The Year of Finishing

So . . . in case it escaped your notice, apparently I took an unscheduled mental health holiday for the month of January. It wasn’t just from blogging and other forms of social media either, it was pretty much from everything.

I’m not going to go into detail about what went wrong mentally, at this point I’m thinking the whys and wherefores don’t matter so much as the fact that I’m back now. But I will say part of it involved going on a reading binge. You know how some people binge watch a particular show on Netflix? That was me with reading. Reading to the exclusion of all else. Thankfully that has slowed down considerably. It took me almost a whole week to read the trilogy I just finished, so I think I’m on the road to recovery. LOL

I gave up on the whole “goals for the year ahead” thing and instead I’ve decided this is the year of finishing – poems, stories, novels . . . . I have a whole lot of unfinished work sitting around, and this is the year I finally start finishing some of it. That’s not to say I won’t write anything new, at the very least I’ll probably do NaNo again, but my focus is going to be on finishing the body of work I have started and never got around to completing. Either finish it, or consign it to the aether once and for all.

But don’t think for a moment I’m foolish enough to devote my whole year to this. First of all, you never know when a brilliant new idea might hit, and far be it for me to ignore a gift from the Muses. And second, there’s just way too much stuff that needs to be finished – the novels alone I could work steadily on for years to come, especially when you consider several of the novels are the beginnings of potential series.

Then we have the abandoned prompts and stories, and snippets of poems to consider. Some of this stuff is so old it’ll be like working on something new. It’s actually very tempting to make a list of it all, just so I can have the pleasure of crossing things off the list when I finish. It’s something to think about anyway.

I also will be trying to find a little balance to my life. Ten years ago I had a lot more going on in my life, and I was getting a lot more writing done. Now I have all kinds of time, and the writing has become more and more elusive. I’m not sure how or when it happened, but I’ve been spending more time at the computer and getting less done. And instead of turning to one of the many other things I could be doing, I sit stubbornly at the computer – I’m a writer, after all, I should be writing – and then beat myself up at the end of the day for getting nothing accomplished.

Ironically, one thing my reading binge taught me this past month is that I can spend copious amounts of time away from the computer and the world won’t come to an end. Reading’s only one of the things I used to take a great deal of pleasure in, time to rediscover life outside of writing. I can still be a writer, just not to the exclusion of all else.

Something tells me I have a long road ahead of me.