The question this month is simple:

What author do you admire the most? Why?

And the answer is thus quite simple. Only because it’s me I’m going to take a little segue first and explain my thinking behind any kind of admiration.

I joke sometimes about certain people being “who I want to be when I grow up”. Now obviously I’m 33 and so I should be grown up but it’s more about the dream they represent I guess – an ideal in some way. I don’t know if I’m unusual in this approach because I feel (possibly mistakenly) that most people would equate author = writing, and talk about the books that have touched their soul, the wordsmiths who transcended the written word to weave something magical.

Now don’t get me wrong that’s good too but when I think of the authors I admire the most, it’s less about their actual words (though I like those too!!) and more about what they have achieved in their career. Essentially, they are where I would like to be.

So I skipped February’s blog topic because I didn’t think I had anything really to contribute (it was about writing ‘hacks’). However, this month the topic is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – The R’s of Revision” and if there’s anything I have opinions about in writing, it’s revision.

I have had a pet peeve for years of people saying revision when they mean editing. I have tried to get less grumpy about it because we are all entitled to use whatever words we want. One persons editing might well be another persons revision – I shouldn’t judge. Yet it’s one of those things that annoys me anyway.

So what is revision?

So last year I managed a sum total of 2 blog topics for WriYe (January and December). I am aiming to do a little better this year. I probably won’t write all of them because some of them don’t speak to me, but I have made a note of the ones I think I could write a post on, and I intend to do a post for all of those.

Anyway the topic this week is to “write your future author bio / FAQ page” and I honestly laughed when I read that. Back in the day I had one of those pages, during my first attempt at publication. I got somebody on Fiverr to write it because I found it so awkward. Now I could cheat and just look in the depths of my hard drive and post that one, but I think I will make an honest attempt myself. It’s been… well lets not think how long its been, but a while, and I’m older and maybe want to say different things I don’t know.

Look I’m actually making the post! I’m not sure I have done this ‘properly’ in a few years so let’s do this. What do I want from this year?

Now goals need to be SMART because when it’s intangible, how do you know when it’s been achieved? I can want inner peace, contentment, some amount of happiness etc. but that’s a feeling and an end result. Maybe I will get it one day, maybe I won’t, but I need to target things I can actually do something about.

This is the time of year I usually get an infusion of hope/optimism – wishful thinking – and I hope, hope with all my heart that the upcoming year will be different. I want it to be better, I want to feel better, so badly and then it never works out. It’s always a disappointment and I hate getting to my recap posts and going “well that was another sucky year”. It always seems like there’s some kind of external reason, but a lot of that is just excuses. I have depression, I have intense anxiety. I am autistic. I have physical symptoms even if I am unsure if I have actual physical issues (the mind likes to screw with the body). Life can be hard but I need to make choices that serve me.

So here we are again.

To be honest I could copy and past a lot of last years ‘year in review’ and it would apply. I’ve got to the end of another year and I feel like I’m no further forward towards my dream.

I started the (2022 goal post) by saying that in my review of 2021 I had put “that I really didn’t want to get to the end of the year and be disappointed again – but I was.” – that is the dream and it is yet to be obtained.

2022, Year in Review

And as I said – here I am again. Another year, another disappointment.

The January blog topic for WriYe is quite open to interpretation I feel. The prompt is:

“(Re)starting fresh, for a new year, new story or after a writing break.”

Now I am both late to this topic and perfectly on time. You see the new year is a boundary time, it’s where you can put the past in the rear-view and ‘start again’. Obviously you can do that at anytime but with the turn of a calendar, and potentially millions of other people doing the same thing, there is a certain weight to it. If 2022 didn’t go well, then that’s ok because 2023 is a fresh start! That kind of thinking.

I struggle with boundary times as they make me reflective. I get torn between the hope of the possibility that maybe the future will be better/different, and being depressed and hopeless over how the past hasn’t been what I wanted, and that another year has gone by and I’m still no closer to my dreams etc. So I guess essentially what I’m saying is the whole “new year, new start” thing is something I feel very keenly. If life is about chances, then I guess psychologically speaking a new year does feel like a new chance. Every year when I do my retrospective and then my plan, I say that I want the upcoming year to be different.

So why did I say I am both late and on time?

This is December’s blog topic but honestly it’s something I would do anyway. Retrospectives are a bit of a thing for me. The prompt is simply to “sum up your year” so I will endeavour to break it down and not just ramble.

In January I did the usual goals post which can be found here – WriYe: Impossible Year.

I started that goal post by saying that in my review of 2021 I had put “that I really didn’t want to get to the end of the year and be disappointed again – but I was.” and that is the dream. Ultimately really that was the dream for this year when I get right down to it. What I said in that goal post was that I was really searching for some confidence, to have some hope again, to feel like I can actually do it.

So did I get that in the end?

I kept saying in my NaNo Retrospective post that I would continue the point in another post – mostly this one! Because I suppose ultimately I didn’t have much to say about this years NaNo on it’s own. I will cover a lot in context with my yearly wrap-up post, and I also knew I wanted to write this post which would talk about some of the problems (or are they problems?) that I experienced.

In life we are surrounded by habit trackers. I have an apple watch and I love that thing but the “three rings everyday” thing just isn’t realistic, at least not for me. I have a 4thewords account and there are other sites (750 words is one I think?) that encourage streaks of writing every single day. If you google about productivity it says instituting habits is a good method, as it takes the decision process out. You do the task because you are supposed to do the task and it’s automatic and requires less willpower. Daily habits are a good thing and they are supposed to help! But are they realistic?

I have struggled with consistency forever. It has been a problem and something I have wanted to work on and ‘fix’ for years. I feel like if I could conquer the consistency problem then I would be able to be on track and ‘win’ at what I need to do. How many times have I lamented about my lack of focus? Bemoaned having good days and “why can’t I do that all the time?” It’s misery making. I want it and it just doesn’t happen. But should it?

The ‘standard’ work week of Monday-Friday 9-5 has a lot wrong with it but it does leave the weekends. These are often not for relaxing but for other tasks but the tasks are different and for the purposes of my point that is enough. Even in the gruelling ‘standard’ 40 hour work week there is a mental break with the weekends from that kind of work at least. (I know a lot of people work Saturdays, or 7 days a week, or multiple jobs, and the 5 day a week 9-5 grind is no picnic anyway, that’s not what I am saying). Wait what was my point? Right my point is doing the same thing every single day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, might be like a nirvana goal but is that even healthy?

My dream life is to be creative for a living. To earn money through writing, maybe even through art (unlikely but hey that’s why it’s a dream). I remember with NaNo for the first couple of years I did the “midnight start” and it was exciting, it was like a party, and the whole ‘literary abandon’ thing of prepping your month, reducing other responsibilities to throw yourself into writing – that’s not reasonable longterm. I know as far as back 2012 I decided if I wanted to do this thing year round/with a view to being professional I had to stop treating NaNo like a special holiday and be more reasonable about it. No more midnight starts, life continues mostly as normal etc. And the thing with normal life is that shit happens.

Today I am writing blog posts because I am fighting against the blackness of depression that just wants me to curl up in a dark corner and disappear. I need a distraction so I don’t spend the day sobbing and feeling worse and worse, and I am trying to do something semi-productive rather than just video games. I have a metric-ton of writing I need to do to finish the draft by the end of the month. I have a lot of art I need to do for some deadlines around Christmas, but today it’s just not happening. I hate myself for that as I am then another day ‘behind’ and also it makes the streaks look sad.

I want to be the type of person that works hard on a consistent basis. I think for anybody every single day is a bad idea as rest is important. My ‘ideal’ is 6 days a week which hurts with those streaks because they are all designed for 7 – everyday. There is no give in them for bad days, for illness, for family events, for holidays, for doctors appointments etc.

I got my NaNo 50k by writing 18 of the 30 days. That wasn’t an even spread of words. Some days I got a few hundred, other days I got several thousand. It was as opposite to being consistent as you can get really – and yet in the end I had the same amount as someone who wrote the 1,667 every single day. I don’t like my approach because I always feel like I could (and should!) have done more but perhaps my approach exists because that was the limit of my capabilities. I did what I could, when I could, and the amount varied because of my mental state/outside factors. That’s life, that’s practical, that’s dare I say, reasonable?

I’m someone that is never really satisfied with what I have done. Even if I make my goal I feel I should I have done it better/faster etc. and a big part of that perpetual disappointment in myself is my lack of consistency. Despite everything I have said here, it’s like a habit – ha! – that I can’t unlearn. It feels like it’s necessary even though I have reasoned out that perhaps it’s not very compatible with reality. I’m not quite sure what the answer to that is. Logic brain says consistency might not be all that, but emotions say otherwise.