Out With the Old

This is the post where normally I recap the goals I set myself at the beginning of the year and confess how well I did/didn’t do keeping them. It’s kind of a nice way to round out the year.

The problem is, I didn’t set any goals at the beginning of last year. Maybe I was in a bad head space, or maybe I had a premonition of the way the year was going to turn on us, but even in my writing journal I set no goals for the year ahead.

There was a lot of awful stuff that happened in 2020. First and foremost, of course, was the COVID-19 pandemic. What started out much the same as the Spanish Flu, or SARS, quickly morphed into something much more dangerous and widespread. If you haven’t Stephen King’s The Stand, you might want to.

The pandemic led to panic shopping and stock piling and widespread lock downs. Even those of us who don’t like venturing out overmuch felt the effects of self-isolation. Businesses that weren’t able to adapt to an on-line presence floundered. The stock market dipped. Schools were closed and people were advised to work from home whenever possible. It became a whole new world.

People came up with a variety of ways to cope with the new order – some thrived while others wilted. Myself, I started out the year by diving into books. I started out re-reading the entire Argeneau Vampire series by Lynsay Sands (30 volumes), and then got into Nora Roberts, followed by Charles de Lint and Alice Hoffman (among others).

According to Indigo I bought over 90 books throughout the year – and that was just online, never mind in-store. No wonder my bookcases are overflowing. And I have no idea how many books I downloaded from Amazon, but my Kindle is having problems updating.

The ironic part about having no goals for 2020 is that it turned out to be a pretty good year for me writing-wise. I got my fiction stories organized. I finish writing Blood Ties (formerly Wandering Wizards). I polished and sent off a story (which I haven’t heard back about, but no news is good news, right?). I completed another NaNo challenge. Sure, the book’s a hot mess, but I got my 50,000 words in. I created an anthology of flash fiction and figured out how to bind it myself.

So yeah. If I had a set of scales that I could weigh the good against the bad for this past year, I’d have to say it wasn’t that bad a year.

It gives me hope for the year ahead.