As hard as it is to admit, I haven’t had the year I wanted to. After attending StokerCon virtually in 2022 while I was recovering from surgery, I’d made a resolution to attend StokerCon 2023 in person.Moreover, I’d intended to have a new project started with enough words on paper that I felt justified pitching it to editors.
That didn’t happen. At all. To any degree. And I got real depressed about it.
That sounds flippant to say, but that’s what happened. When I got to late April, the time of PenguiCon (a local convention I’ve attended/paneled), I realized that I hadn’t done anything to be able to attend PenguiCon or StokerCon and had written hardly anything, much less enough to have something to pitch.
Work had gotten in the way, because I let it. The rest of life had gotten in the way, because I let it. I stopped attending monthly meetings of Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers because, even with most Sundays off work, I always seemed to be working on meeting days, because I wasn’t requesting them off.
I also realized that, after publishing Experiment: Schrodinger about this time last year, I hadn’t followed through on my resolution to publish one of my previously published stories every other month. I was getting another one ready to go, but then ran into a minor roadblock, and let it completely derail me.
Despite what I said I wanted to do, I wasn’t acting like I wanted to do it. I wasn’t making time to do it. I wasn’t building it into my schedule. I wasn’t prioritizing it to the same degree I prioritized other things in my life, including scrolling endlessly on my phone, which is kind of what happened today.
Because after getting depressed and derailed in the spring, through the summer biking/traveling season, and then into the fall, I realized that I still wasn’t making time for writing. I wasn’t making time for myself. So after some deep thought, my first step was creating a schedule for myself for writing on Chimerical Dark.
I haven’t been good or consistent at keeping a blog. Mostly because I don’t have of what I think of as a Social Media Personality. But also, without a structure or schedule, it’s too easy to let it slip, keep it at the bottom of my to do list, and continue moving things above it.
Which is why I’m proud of myself for writing this post today. Because it was on my schedule to write today. And I did. Which is something.
