I read the last few lines of my last blog post from June 24th, 2023, now and just shake my head.
This past week I was at two separate conferences and had nearly a 70-hour work week but at the end of it all there was light: I could see this morning.
This glorious Saturday morning when I would not have to set an alarm for the first time in months, when I could sleep in and then kickstart my summer of writing.
And now I’m here and I’m happy and my shoulders are lowered and there’s a smile on my face.
These last few months have just been the space between the words.
The summer is here and it’s time to write again.
Four days later my mother died.
This is the first public space in which I’ve written those words.
But this is not a post about that.
This is a post about a person, me, who while unemployed for 14 months, finished writing a book that had taken 13 years to write and wrote almost the whole of another book before getting back to work.
And in the first 14 months back to work he managed to write one short story.
And it wasn’t even really any good.
He tried to get back into it but the best laid plans remained just that: plans.
Oh, he scribbled a few words a day on Twitter/X. Wrote down a ton of story ideas. He even wrote down plans to write.
But never. Actually. Wrote.
This past week he, I, took a hard look at what I wanted to accomplish this year. I reframed the thinking around work/life balance to ensure it wasn’t just the hours I was carving up, but the value I was getting out of those hours.
A colleague put it perfectly this past week back to work as we shared similar intentions: “What good is making the time for myself and my home life if my battery is at zero when I get there?”
On January 1st I spent the day articulating my intentions to myself.
Am I hiding from the stronger word “resolutions”? You bet.
My 5 writing intentions this year are as follows:
- Every Sunday curate a writing plan for the week ahead that accounts for real world schedules and commitments.
- Stick to that schedule.
- Write 1 short story per week – I have over a hundred ideas from last year alone, let’s turn them into something.
- Work on the book twice a week – no word counts, no mandatory hours, just open the manuscript and put actual thought and work into what needs to happen next
- Get published – not for a lack of trying in the past, but I remain unpublished. That changes this year.
This post is about a person, me, who in the last week took one of his favourite short stories he’s ever written that has hardy ever been submitted anywhere and went looking for a home for it. I hope I’ve found that space.
This post is about a person, me, who wrote a new short story he is VERY happy with this week and, as the threads of the universe were stitched together for me while I wrote it, I found a potential home for it as well and just submitted it now.
This post is about a person who did not work on his book this week but realizes that this is okay because, holy hell, those other two bits are huge for him right now and also he spent Friday in bed, sick. Again, these are intentions, not resolutions. The only resolution I have is to be kinder to myself about my intentions.
Lastly, this post is absolutely not about loss, it is about what has been gained.
Perspective.
And that, more than anything, is what is going to define the next 14 months and the start of my career as a published writer.