Here we go again

My early adulthood flew by at high speed. Weeks passed in a blink and years blurred into each other. It was, frankly, a little scary, particularly with what I heard from those of previous generations that the older you get, the faster your life goes.

Once I had my daughter, however, time seemed to slow down; or rather, I felt the passing time much more keenly. After all, there is a big difference in a year of a child’s life, and looking back, it certainly felt like a significant period of time had passed. It has been a blessedly ongoing state of mind.

Now, however, as I look back on 2020, I’m feeling the same sense of disbelief that it’s been so long as I felt in my twenties. I was there, obviously; I lived through it all, suffered the same stress and know that I did so, but now that the year has finally turned, I’m amazed that it’s already gone.

And, despite that my family and I were homebound for much of the year, it’s not as though nothing happened. I released eight new books, twice as many as the previous best year for Brain Lag, one of them my own, and wrote the first draft of a new one. I doubled my reading goal for the year, played through several video games, and continued learning Japanese and guitar. Celebrated birthdays and my fifteenth anniversary. Got a kitten and watched her grow up into a crazy little cat.

Some things did fall by the wayside, of course. All my in-person events planned for the year were cancelled. Rarely got out into nature or took photographs or, of course, interacted with other people. While it has been nice to have nearly all my weekends free, I have missed conventions, and the number of photos I took with my good camera this year dropped steeply.

But, I am here, I made the best of it, and I and my family are safe. I can’t complain in the face of that.

So, looking back at last year’s new year post, did I achieve my goals for 2020? For my reading goal: yes. All I really wanted to do was get through my physical TBRs, and I did that by summer. With conventions suspended, I bought only a handful of new ones, so I fully caught up with those, and began going through the ebooks I have collected over the years.

I also finally kicked the habit of playing pointless mobile games in down time and drastically reduced the amount of TV (read: YouTube) I watched in the evenings, giving me more reading time. By the end of the year, I surpassed my goal of 23 books to finish 46. (Again, not counting the books read for Brain Lag.)

My only other main goal of 2020 was to finish the first draft of the final book of my Sisters of Chaos trilogy, and as I posted here a month ago, I finished that in November. I should have spent more time working on the story last month, but I rode the success of having finished the draft too much, and barely added 1,000 words. Also, I baked a lot of cookies after hours instead of writing. And read, and played video games…

I did a fairly good job of maintaining other healthy habits this year. I’m closing on a two-year daily streak on DuoLingo for Japanese (minus a handful of cheat days). I may not feel very proficient in the language, but it’s learning, anyway. I had a bit of a lull with guitar practice in early fall, but I have made further progress with it. I even learned a new song on piano, which I hadn’t touched in many years, though lack of good instruction kept me from progressing any more with it.

Overall, I’m pretty content with my progress for last year. Pleased, even.

I’m not really in competition with myself, so for 2021, I’m going to set my reading goal at a nice even 30 and see where I end up.

Writing is a little trickier. I don’t anticipate needing to, and don’t want to, spend a long time in the first round of edits, but it’s hard to guess at how long it’s going to take. Perhaps by mid-year I can get the draft out to beta readers, and given a couple of months for them to go over it, I should hopefully be well on my way to a final draft by the end of 2021.

For everything else, again, I don’t really have progress goals, I just want to maintain habits. Thanks to a sale on my preferred guitar instruction app, I have more time with which to practice, and intend to continue doing so. Japanese I’m content with trying to reach my daily goal; I’m just learning it for fun, not really out to master it or reach any particular level of proficiency in any given period of time. Perhaps I should make some goals for finishing some of the video games I’ve had piling up over the past couple years. One a month should be doable, and will make a good dent in the pile.

2020 was a pretty messy year, but we can only do what we can do, and vow to do our best going forward.

I’m ready for it. Let’s do this.