at the closing of the year
If I cannot bring you comfort, then at least I bring you hope.
It’s been kind of a hell of a year.
As a recap: at the beginning of 2017, I was working for a Large Tech Company You’ve Definitely Heard Of as well as being the communications manager for a nonprofit, I was living in a small town in the middle of nowhere where I could see the ocean from my front stoop, and I was working on drafting a novel.
At the end of 2017, none of these things are true.
I moved back to the Seattle area, which has some upsides, but I miss the ocean and my positively enormous and very cheap apartment. (I now have a small, not-really-cheap, kind of sucky apartment.) I am working for a different Large Tech Company You’ve Definitely Heard Of, and as of the end of the year the baton of nonprofit communications will be entirely passed to my successor. And as for the novel, I haven’t touched it or any other writing for months.
A lot of the changes I’ve made this year are because between the two jobs and the writing, I was working pretty much all the time I wasn’t sleeping, and the writing fell to the bottom of the priority list. This is one of the pitfalls of being a writer who has a full-time job–sometimes, the writing takes a hit because everything else is happening all at once. I find that my time isn’t necessarily the limiting factor–the brain energy to write after a long day of work and doing marketing writing is.
I didn’t publish anything this year. I only got one short story and a third of a novel draft written. The political climate is terrifying (and the fact that it’s starting to feel normal is also terrifying). But I’m also working at a job that I love for a great company, I’ve gotten my life mostly rearranged to make a fresh start in 2018, and I actually paid my quarterly taxes this year. (This has been a problem in years past. I don’t have any reason to be bad with money, but I am bad with money. And taxes.)
Overall, I think I’m making progress. And one of the things I’m doing early in 2018 is getting back on the writing and submitting wagon. With any luck, my skills haven’t rusted completely away…
