One Day, One Year

We were discussing the "one day novel" in our informal writer's group meeting this week, as in "one day, I'll write a novel." Looking back, I've overcome a lot of personal one-day bucket list items:

  • One day, I'll clean up that draft and send it to beta readers
  • One day, I'll incorporate those comments back into the draft
  • One day, I'll proofread it
  • One day, I'll publish another ebook
  • One day, I'll learn how to typeset
  • One day, I'll learn this drawing software
  • One day, I'll set up the author web site and blog (hi!)
  • One day, I'll go back to social media 
  • One day, I'll do a public reading 
  • One day, I'll find a reader

It's good to take inventory now and then, to realize how many one-days are done. It's hard, sometimes, when we see all the steps ahead of us to realize that the only way we have this new view is by taking steps to reach it. Yes, there's another mountain again, but don't lose sight of the foothills we climbed to get here.

I came into 2025 with a stronger sense of creative purpose, trying in some way to counter the negativity and political chaos that was all but guaranteed to follow. It's been exactly as frustrating as I expected, real life, but it's also channeled my energy into this--the writing, the book(s), the writer's group, and more. Steel is forged and hammered to strengthen it, to make an edge, to keep it keenly sharp. I'm ending the year looking at the hills we've climbed, at the mountain ahead of us, and the footprints we've left to reach this view.

Looking forward to another year of one-days.

🧩🦏

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creativity Under Fire

There's nothing my Muse ( she/her ) likes better than stillness. Over the years of our partnership, we've agreed on the terms of our relationship: namely, that I show up, hoping to write, and if she's in the neighborhood, will deign to drop by and leave me some raw material. It's a dysfunctional partnership, but it's ours. What matters (for her) is that I'm showing up, pen poised, mine relatively clear, ready to go. This... is not easy. "Relatively clear" is not my state of mind most days, before the whole stare-of-the-world gets factored in. Honestly, some days, the Muse could pull up in her ride, ready to toss an institutional brick through my proverbial mental plate-glass window, but I'm too preoccupied to hear her show up. And she doesn't accept being ignored. She gets sulky. Withdrawn. Reluctant. And ultimately: erratic, maybe the worst thing for a Muse to be when she's tethered to someone with a full life. Why do all the good ideas co...
Read more

Community

 Rhinos may be solitary, but writers can't go it alone. Or at least, that's what I'm reminding myself these days. I've got a lot of drafts--a whole oversize bin of typescripts--all hammered or scribbled out in relative anonymity and the safety of knowing that  nobody will ever read them.  And without being held accountable for quality, that elided into  and nobody has to edit them, either.  Because for an audience of one, I don't need to please anyone, or deal with all those linguistic luxuries like "good grammar" and "understandable plot" and "deadly dull dialogue." First drafts are notoriously shitty things, but if they just remain so, then all I have is a bin of... well, crap. The spark that turned it around was actually investing time to edge out of the reclusive-scribbler comfort zone and get into a  safe writerly space.  A safe  sharing  space, specifically, which felt more than a little frightening. I'd been drafting novels f...
Read more

Synthetic Schemes

I took a long social media hiatus, starting around 2016 and really doubling down in 2020. I'd been quite active for a while, but personal and world events happened, as events do, and I decided to refocus my limited energies. Events kept happening without me, and that was fine.  No thanks, I'm good. I'm over here doing my own thing. Platforms come and go, and the pace of their arrivals-and-departures has always been rapid. Yesterday's Geocities begat MySpace begat Tumblr begat Facebook begat Instagram begat SnapChat begat TikTok, to trace one lineage. One advantage to having seen these rises and falls is the luxury to recognize the cycles, and know they'll come again. It's autumn now where I live, and our rainy season has begun, and the trees are being stripped of their last determined leaves. I know in the spring they will bud again. At some point, there will be a new begetting  in the platform ecosystem as well. "Too big to fail" doesn't apply to ...
Read more