Writing prompts: this can’t continue

I think I have come to the point where pursuing both sets of writing prompts just isn’t possible: while the first week or so featured gentle exploration, and I could generally contain the introspection and the act of writing to under an hour, both paths are going deeper, and diverging rather than running in parallel. I took some time off because I had a lot of paid work to deal with, which taps into a neighbouring reservoir and can eat a lot of time and energy in a day. When I came back, I started to feel the pull in two directions: a kind of upward, uplifting, sweetness in the first set (appropriate for self-love), and a different direction for the second, “the way out is through” kind of thing. Deeper into pain. Both are good and valid paths but I can’t contain them both so close together, much less in a morning before work (that context switch)… and that’s aside from my mornings spreading themselves out over the day as it is.

I’ve wondered whether I can do one in the morning and one in the evening, an up/down movement to bracket the day, which I like. All the same, I hit prompt after prompt that just doesn’t feel right to work on today, and most require movement in the world to accomplish: where to put it? Tomorrow, maybe, but this doesn’t answer my problem today. Maybe I can skip a bunch until something clicks?

The answer that is arising now is to treat my “backlog” as a pool of prompts to pick from and do what I can on the day, and indeed what meets the energy of any given day. Deviate from the set path and forge my own. Perhaps try out set 1 in the mornings, and set 2 in the evenings (and perhaps stick closer to its path, as well).