Looking Back and Looking Forward
Today's the first day of a new year, and I always like to take a moment to reflect on the past year and think about what I'd like to achieve in the new one. However, given what an utter mess 2020 was, and how uncertain 2021 is looking, it's going to be different -- and difficult.
I think most of us can agree that 2020 was a dumpster fire. For some people, the first two months weren't too bad. Maybe it would've been better for us if we hadn't lost our January and February conventions to a shoot-the-messenger situation, but the January show was getting weaker, and the February one had been stagnant, so that wasn't a sure thing. In any case, we were busy dealing with a home-repair situation that turned out to be more complex and complicated than initially anticipated, such that what should've been done in mid-January ended up not getting finished until the middle of March, just in time for the restrictions and shutdowns.
With everything so up in the air, literally not knowing from day to day or even hour to hour what the situation was going to be, focus and concentration pretty much evaporated. There went all the plans for the writing I was going to get done. In fact, I don't think I would've gotten much of any writing done without the weekly challenges from Odd Prompts, Indies Unlimited, etc. I did manage to get one new novelette out, but while I was working on preparing another, I had a Weird Situation blow up with the promoter at one of our best conventions, and while I was dealing with that, all my momentum on that project went pfft.
By the time I could recover from that rug getting yanked out from under my feet, the craziness surrounding the election was really ramping up, and then the holidays, so that project got put on the back burner until the new year. Trying to forcibly recover the momentum Right Now simply wasn't worth it.
I'm trying to get things pulled back together again for the new year, but obviously there's not a whole lot I can do about whether conventions happen, let alone whether I get enough sales for them to be profitable. Given that the level of uncertainty looks like it's going to stay high, and thus the stress that goes with it, I'm thinking that focus and concentration are going to continue to be an uphill battle for me. Which means that it's going to be really difficult to do sustained work on a project when my mind is trying to run five directions at once.
We'll see what I can manage.
I think most of us can agree that 2020 was a dumpster fire. For some people, the first two months weren't too bad. Maybe it would've been better for us if we hadn't lost our January and February conventions to a shoot-the-messenger situation, but the January show was getting weaker, and the February one had been stagnant, so that wasn't a sure thing. In any case, we were busy dealing with a home-repair situation that turned out to be more complex and complicated than initially anticipated, such that what should've been done in mid-January ended up not getting finished until the middle of March, just in time for the restrictions and shutdowns.
With everything so up in the air, literally not knowing from day to day or even hour to hour what the situation was going to be, focus and concentration pretty much evaporated. There went all the plans for the writing I was going to get done. In fact, I don't think I would've gotten much of any writing done without the weekly challenges from Odd Prompts, Indies Unlimited, etc. I did manage to get one new novelette out, but while I was working on preparing another, I had a Weird Situation blow up with the promoter at one of our best conventions, and while I was dealing with that, all my momentum on that project went pfft.
By the time I could recover from that rug getting yanked out from under my feet, the craziness surrounding the election was really ramping up, and then the holidays, so that project got put on the back burner until the new year. Trying to forcibly recover the momentum Right Now simply wasn't worth it.
I'm trying to get things pulled back together again for the new year, but obviously there's not a whole lot I can do about whether conventions happen, let alone whether I get enough sales for them to be profitable. Given that the level of uncertainty looks like it's going to stay high, and thus the stress that goes with it, I'm thinking that focus and concentration are going to continue to be an uphill battle for me. Which means that it's going to be really difficult to do sustained work on a project when my mind is trying to run five directions at once.
We'll see what I can manage.