I haven’t done a Year in Review post for a lot of years, but since my areas of focus for 2020 is to get back in touch with my process (iterate and optimize!), be more positive about small, slow, incremental change, and to be more accountable to my writing, it seems like a good idea to look at the past couple of years before jumping forward into a bright shiny January.
2018
Since 2008, I’ve chosen a word to focus on each year. For 2018, the word was
Metamorphosis. And boy, did it live up to that moniker.
2018 was a year of transition. And change. And upheaval.
2018 was the year I decided to start working on a YA. It was the year I changed jobs—twice. It was the year I parted ways with my first agent. The year my energy and overall health took a nosedive. The year I came to a deep understanding that fostering terminally ill cats didn’t only mean keeping them comfortable, but also letting them go; related: this is also the year I self-published a book to help pay for cat hospice.
I walked out of 2018--like most people, I think--thankful and a little baffled that I had made it through the year intact. Looking back, there isn’t any one thing that stands out as being overwhelmingly awful. More like, every day, the world just seemed to get a little bit worse. A little bit darker. A little bit more lonely.
As someone who was writing primarily romance, and still trying to find her voice again after a pretty major setback a couple of years prior, every day, every book, every word was an act of...not faith, but desperation. I felt as though I was rushing up the face of a crumbling crag and any moment I would lose my grip, my footing, my nerve, and plummet onto the sharp rocks below.
There was a moment during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings where I spent my days listening to the men in my office joke about not making eye contact with the women lest they be accused of rape, then spent my nights at Starbucks openly weeping through the first draft of what I was sure would be the last book I would ever write.
I forced myself to finish that draft in one mad weekend binge in December, hit save, and took the rest of the year off.
2018 Stats:
Words written: 65,004
Books finished: 2
Books published: 1
# of days written: 55
Longest writing streak: 12
Ave. words per day: 1,153
Ave. minutes per day: 48
Ave. words per hour: 1,579
Most productive days: Wednesdays and Saturdays
Least productive day: Tuesday
2019
2018 left me defeated, demoralized, and hungry for more. So hungry I feared I could never get enough: Validation. Success. Achievement. Purpose. Joy.
In her podcast leading up to the release of
Big Magic, Liz Gilbert, in conversation with Brene Brown, talked about how creativity, if not used, has a tendency to metastasize into a bitter, toxic thing.
This is the feeling that consumed me in the first half of 2019. For years, I had allowed myself to be vulnerable in service to my writing, and in doing so, had opened myself to a fragility that did not lend itself to the world at large. Months of going through the motions of the daily things, ignoring the steady hum of creativity, had allowed it to decay.
I wanted so much more. But
more felt…unattainable.
Rotting from the inside out, though? That was unpardonable.
Digging up the box where I had buried that part of myself was terrifying. I knew I couldn’t ease into it. There were no easy first steps. If I wanted more, I had to go after more. And I had to do so fearlessly. I had to change my thinking. My habits. My routine. I had to completely re-prioritize my life.
And then I had to
leap.
So that’s what I did.
I joined a healthy group at work. I restructured my social groups, limited my time spent around negative, toxic behavior, and became more intentional in my relationships. I wrapped one day a week in iron-clad solitude and turned all the alerts off of my phone. I stopped working overtime and installed boundaries where before there had been none.
I pissed a lot of people off.
I got over it.
Years ago,
I’d read on Jessica Lemmon’s blog about how she used a goal-setting system called PowerSheets to help her focus. Since it was mid-year, they were having a sale on the six-month undated version, so I thought, why not? It will be good practice for 2020.
Working through the exercises was like peeling layers of skin away from a blister. All that armor that had protected me from that all-consuming want was gone. I couldn’t ignore it. And I couldn’t pretend my rather comfortable life and pretty good job were satisfying anymore.
I poured as much of myself into writing as I could, but with a new rule: I wouldn’t be an asshole to myself this time. I would try for the sake of trying, not in the hopes of success, and I wouldn’t let failure stop me.
This is still a daily struggle. I’m not perfect and I never will be. There are going to be days when I let myself down, or things don’t go my way, or someone gets something I want and I react poorly to it. But I hope every day I get a little bit better at letting go of the outcome and letting myself write because there are stories to tell.
2019 Stats:
Words written: 150,598
Books finished: 3
Books published: 0
# of days written: 141
Longest writing streak: 20
Ave. words per day: 1,076
Ave. minutes per day: 63
Ave. words per hour: 1,121
Most productive days: Sundays and Fridays
Least productive day: Thursday
