Back in Time by nicholasjon – License:CC BY-NC 2.0
Human perception of time is a funny thing. With the passing of each year, I never fail to wonder, where the heck did the last 365 days go? This past year was no different. In fact the older I get the more time seems to go by faster. Is it because we become acutely aware of how little we have left on this planet? Or is it because so many routine things fill our lives that the passage of time flows seamlessly without big show stopper moments to make us sit up and take notice?
Either way it’s good that events like marking the passage from one year into the next give us pause to reflect on the previous year and try to evaluate its relative worth. Like the Egyptian god Anubis weighing the heart of the deceased in the afterlife, we try to take stock in the previous year and pass judgement on its merit. Did the year live up to our expectations, exceed it, or was it somehow lacking.
From a writing perspective 2013 was a very different year for me in a number of ways. As far as output goes I didn’t feel as productive as I have in previous years. I worked on a number of new short stories, but nothing new made it to market. I did shop around several of my older more polished pieces and was successful at finding a home for Second Harvest. My first official sale! The story will be published in Fictionvale.com this coming March. (Trust me, this won’t be my last post trumpeting that.)
I worked on my novel, but it lacked shape and purpose. My writing group took the time to help me reorient myself and try to focus on some of the big picture items that I was trying to dance around. It was helpful and productive and truth be told, I don’t know what I would do without them. That being said, I still failed to proceed at a satisfactory pace with that project. I recently posted about my determination to fix that here – DIY: Vision Versus Reality.
The other big project I took on this year was signing up for the Playwright Junction workshop this fall. The 12 week course is just wrapping up this month, and we’ll have ten minute excerpts from our work produced as a dramatic reading by professional actors later this month. The course has be very eye-opening and helped me focus on my writing in new ways that I hope to continue beyond the end of the workshop in my writing and possibly in other theatre work.
So where does that leave me? Did 2013 end up where I expected it to? Hardly. I would have been disappointed if it had been so predictable. Was it a successful year, writing-wise? An unqualified yes. Was it as successful as I had hoped? That one is a bit more murky. Less successful on the output front, but more successful in the breakthrough and rejuvenating my writing brain.
So where does that leave me for 2014? I want to become more focused and productive. Basic stuff. Butt in chair – hands on keyboard kind of basics. More time spent free writing from prompts and ideas. A lot of the writing prompts that we used in the playwright workshop forced me to write without thinking and while it was frustrating at times, it was also liberating.
As for projects my primary goal is simple. I have to put up or shut up and finish a draft of the current novel I am working on. That is the big one. No holding back.
My Secondary goals:
- Finish and submit more short stories to market this year.
- Explore writing workshop opportunities
I also want to leave room for opportunity to knock. You never know when something that could change your life will present itself and you have to be in a position to capitalize on it.
All in all I am looking forward to 2014 being a fantastic year not only in my writing, but in other aspects of my life as well.
Best wishes for 2014 to everyone.