#dailyprompt2764 — Public Fediverse posts

How do I stay motivated when learning something new? I had to answer this WordPress prompt because of what I am going through right now, and what I thought about this morning is totally me!

I paint flowers, lots of them. I am currently trying to figure out this whole Etsy keywords SEO thing. I woke up and wanted to meditate and have a gratitude morning. Instead, I opened up my computer and headed over to my shop. AND, I felt hopeless. It has been 6 months, and I have a few sales. I like my work, but I know it’s all in the presentation. Have I created the art that people want to buy? Then there are titles, keywords, and the SEO that frankly, I am sick of.

Then something in me said, ” We have to make this work. There is no if.” This is my dream. I am putting this out there in the world and seeking guidance. I trust and believe the answer will find me! In that moment, I went back to last year’s work and added new pieces to my shop. Then I made a few changes to my keywords and switched out some frames. It was beautiful!

Inside, I felt like a kid in a candy store, or better yet, that kid who is told we are going to paint today, here are the tools, have fun!

How do I stay motivated when I am learning something new? I feel what I feel, give myself a pep talk when I need it, and get back in there and do what I love! Most importantly, I look for a positive lesson that I can learn from and move forward with.

Do I want to share my work with the world? I do! That is the biggest positive reason to move forward. And that made me smile. Here I am. I am going to go for a stroll and splurge on that dessert.

BRECK: Dead Delivery Chapter Twelve

BRECK: Dead Delivery

Chapter Twelve — The Learning Curve

Daily prompt: How do you stay motivated when learning something new? — This chapter explores that question through Breck and Pell: what it means to learn something because you can’t stop, versus being told to.

About this series: BRECK: Dead Delivery is a serialized fantasy story set in the world of Lumenvale — a slow-burn noir about Breck, a former soldier turned reluctant courier navigating the corrupt town of Crestfall. Each chapter is a self-contained scene advancing an overarching mystery. This is Chapter Twelve. Read from the beginning →

Pell found him first.

The boy materialized from the narrow gap between the cooperage and the adjoining leather-worker’s shed the way he materialized from everywhere — without announcement, without the preliminary scuff of boots on stone that preceded most people’s arrivals, as though he had learned to move through Crestfall’s geography the way water moved through cracks: finding the path of least resistance, arriving exactly where pressure required him to be.

He fell into step beside Breck without preamble, his stride adjusted to Breck’s considerably longer one in the unconscious, practiced way of someone who had spent considerable time walking beside adults whose legs covered more ground than his own.

“You talked to Jorin,” Pell said.

It was not a question. The boy’s intelligence-gathering apparatus in this town had long since rendered questions largely redundant.

“I did.”

“He looked different at the third bell. When he took his post.” Pell’s eyes moved across the street ahead of them in his habitual scanning pattern — doorways, windows, the roofline, the place where the alley behind the grain merchant opened onto the main road. “Less like a man carrying something heavy. More like a man who knows what the heavy thing is finally for.”

Breck glanced at him sidelong. The boy was twelve years old and read people with the accuracy of someone who had learned young that accurate reading was a survival skill rather than a social grace. It was the kind of intelligence that didn’t come from instruction — it came from sustained, motivated observation, from years of watching a town compress itself under the weight of something wrong and cataloguing every effect of that compression with the patient thoroughness of a natural scientist.

“How did you learn to do that?” Breck said.

Pell considered the question with the seriousness it deserved, which was the way he considered most things.

“I didn’t know I was learning it,” he said finally. “I just kept watching because I couldn’t stop being interested. And then one morning I realized I could read the whole square from the cooperage step — who was afraid, who was performing, who was carrying something they hadn’t told anyone about.” He paused, his boots finding the dry center of a puddled stretch of cobblestone with the automatic precision of long familiarity. “My father says I should find something useful to do instead of sitting and watching all day.”

“Your father is wrong,” Breck said.

Pell looked at him with an expression that contained several emotions in rapid succession — surprise, then a flicker of something warmer, then the careful return to his habitual equanimity, the guard coming back up with the practiced ease of long habit.

“He taught me cooperage,” Pell said. “I wasn’t good at it.”

“Were you interested in it?”

A silence that was answer enough.

“The things you’re good at,” Breck said, “are usually the things you couldn’t stop doing when no one was watching. Not the things someone handed you and said — here, learn this, it’s useful.” He adjusted the satchel strap across his chest, feeling the familiar weight of it settle. “The motivation isn’t something you manufacture. It’s something you follow.”

They turned off the main road onto the narrower street that ran behind the market stalls, the one that gave a clear sightline to the magistrate’s office rear entrance without requiring proximity to it. Breck had walked this route three times in the past two days, at different hours, in different weather, building the three-dimensional picture that existed now in his memory with the clean detail of a well-drawn map.

He had learned to do this in the war.

Not from a manual or a commanding officer’s instruction — from necessity, and from the recognition that the alternative to thorough prior knowledge was improvisation under pressure, and that improvisation under pressure had a consistent and unacceptable cost. He had been afraid, in those first months of courier work, that he would make a mistake that could not be corrected. That fear had been the most effective teacher he’d ever had. It had made him pay attention with a quality of attention he hadn’t known he possessed until it was required of him.

The fear had faded over time, replaced by something quieter and more durable: the simple deep satisfaction of a thing done well. Of a route memorized completely, a plan built without gaps, the particular pleasure of arriving at the moment of action and finding that the preparation had been sufficient. That satisfaction was its own motivation. It compounded — each completed thing making the next one more desirable, the skill curve becoming its own reward once you were far enough along it to feel the difference between knowing something partially and knowing it completely.

“Tonight,” Pell said. Not a question, not a statement — something between the two, calibrated for confirmation.

“Tonight.”

The boy nodded once, with the gravity of someone absorbing a scheduled event rather than an uncertainty.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Nothing,” Breck said.

Pell looked at him. The look contained a precise and articulate objection delivered without words.

“I need you somewhere safe,” Breck said, with the slightly different inflection he used for things that were not negotiable. “What happens tonight is not something a twelve-year-old participates in. You’ve already done your part. The map was your part. It was essential and it’s done.”

The boy was quiet for three full strides — enough distance for Breck to understand that the quiet was not acceptance but processing, the argument being constructed rather than abandoned.

“He took the cooperage,” Pell said finally. His voice had changed register — lower, stripped of the careful equanimity, the actual thing showing through the way actual things showed through in people when they finally got to the real sentence. “Not just the income. My father sits in the back room now and stares at the tools and doesn’t pick them up. My mother pretends she doesn’t see it.” He looked straight ahead at the wet cobblestones. “Aldric Moss asked questions and disappeared. My father stopped asking questions and disappeared anyway. Just — differently.”

The street was empty around them. Rain had begun again in its fine, persistent way, darkening the stone and collecting in the low places and running in thin clear rivers along the gutter toward the Calwick somewhere below and behind the rear yards.

Breck stopped walking.

Pell stopped too, a half-step later, and looked up at him with the rain beginning to collect in his dark hair and the real thing still showing in his face, the careful equanimity down.

“I know,” Breck said.

Two words. No elaboration. Not because elaboration wasn’t available, but because Pell was twelve years old and intelligent enough to understand that two words from a man who didn’t waste them carried more weight than a paragraph from someone who did.

The boy held his gaze for a moment, checking the words for the thing that sometimes hid behind them — for the patronizing or the performative or the comfortable lie dressed as acknowledgment. He found none of those things, which was the only reason he accepted the words at all.

He nodded. A single motion. The real thing went back behind the equanimity, but differently than before — not suppressed, just carried more deliberately, the way you carried something once you understood it had a name.

“Go home after dark,” Breck said. “Keep your mother inside. Don’t come to the square regardless of what you hear.”

“And tomorrow?”

Breck looked at him — at the serious face and the rain-darkened hair and the intelligence behind the eyes that had been paying attention to this town since before it had given him any reason to stop.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “is a different lesson.”

He turned and walked back toward the inn, and the rain continued its patient work on the stones around him, and somewhere across the square the magistrate’s office sat with its fresh mortar and its town seal and the particular silence of something that did not yet know what was coming for it.

Behind him, Pell stood for a moment longer.

Then he turned and went home.

← Chapter Eleven  |  All Chapters

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

This is Chapter Twelve of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized fantasy story by Chad Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. New chapters posted regularly at chadwickrye.wordpress.com.

New information is almost always motivating… Weekly Recap 5/11/2026

The beauty about learning new things is that a small amount of fresh information is almost always interesting. Maybe that information is about the Gimli Glider or the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars—it doesn’t matter… it can be anything. I’ll bet you click on at least one of those links to find out what they are. I’ll also bet you find it interesting for about 30 seconds.

That’s why it’s so easy to fall into a rabbit hole on websites like Wikipedia. You can get small amounts of surface-level information on a nearly infinite amount of topics. You stay locked in a perpetual dive of “oh that’s slightly interesting.” And it’s probably also why people can so easily get locked into doomscrolling short videos and reels. The constant shifting of topics prevents your brain from timing out.

Well, that… and cat videos.

For me, the struggle with learning comes when you need to go beyond that surface level—when you need to know and retain the basic concepts for a much deeper exploration. That’s when it starts to become work.

You have to ask yourself: do I really want to know this?

And that, my friends, is why I know far more about Star Trek than I do about cars.

Good morning and happy Monday, friends.

And Happy Mother’s Day and such.

• Pre-Release on Patreon: New interview with Christopher Penczak!

It was Selene’s birthday this past week, so happy birthday to my amazing wife of almost a decade! Also, thank you to Trader Joe’s for providing me with gift wrap for her present.

To celebrate, we had a week filled with seafood. I should point out in advance that, generally speaking (and despite the frequent sushi pictures you’ve seen on my updates this year), seafood does not rank anywhere in my top favorite foods.

First, we went out to a local seafood place. I got a lobster roll. Selene got some sort of mixed seafood pasta.

Later, we went visited a restaurant that does seafood boils.

I think this was the first time I’ve really had crab. I’ve never cracked shells before… at least, not that I can remember. It was definitely an interesting experience. And you know what? I didn’t hate it. But it certainly makes you work for your food.

And look at my beautiful wife being such a good sport. I asked her very kindly to put on the bib and gloves that were provided so that I could take a picture.

In other news, I’m making new rune sets.

You can grab one on Etsy.

I’ve also been investing a lot of time in creating some new and interesting videos for you. Lots or recording and editing going on over here. I hope to have something cool to show off in about a week or so!

Earlier in the week, I was blessed by a bluejay visit.

That picture was with maxed out zoom on my phone. It got significantly closer—and brought friends—but I wasn’t quick enough with the camera.

Oh, guys… I need your help. I’m like 300 “watch hours” away from leveling up on YouTube to the point where they’ll let me apply for the partner program. If 10 of you watch this playlist of M3 episodes, I’ll hit the goal. Yeah, it’s a really long playlist… but you could just like, I don’t know… put it on in the background while you’re sleeping.

Okay, okay… you don’t have to.

Well, that’s all for now. Stay tuned for more soon!