2021

I just realized I only blogged once in 2020. And if that isn’t a metaphor for the last year, then I’m not sure what is. I even planned going into 2020 to blog more often, trying to at least hit once a month. But nope. I wrote one blog. Whoops. I’m not a big one for resolutions, so I have zero expectation that I’ll blog more this year–though last year sets the bar pretty low. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. But I’m still here after the year we’ve all had.

It seems so long ago, January 1, 2020. The first three months of the year just flashed by in a blip, and now they seem as if it was someone else’s life. Even looking at myself in pictures, it seems another world ago. I sometimes wonder how my own memory will look back on these times. Will it be one of those moments that is written down in CAPITAL LETTERS? A clear defining point marking then and now. Or will it just be a gradual blur of days that slide from the world that was, to the world that will be? Time will tell.

I think it’s odd sometimes that my youngest likely won’t recall a time before COVID. That the world he will know is a post-pandemic world.

As for the actual writing front I managed quite a bit. I finished up the manuscript I thought would be the end of me. One I’d wrestled with since day one, and I still think is one of the tightest things I’ve ever written. Of course after getting that off my plate, I ended up writing something that couldn’t be more different. I tried my hand at a single POV, actually chronological, book for the first time. And it’s been one of the more eye opening experiences of my life. That isn’t to say I wont try to torture myself and return to dual POV things at some point. But for all the struggle and strife in my writing process the first three months of the year, the project I’m finishing up now has come easily and has been downright fun to write–and come on–that has to count for something in this year!

Sometimes I look back and am surprised I’ve been as productive as I have this year. Kids home from school. General uncertainty about *gestures wildly around* and it’s not over. Probably not for another year or so. Oh things may gradually get better, but it’s going to be a while before we get back to normal–if we ever do.

It’s the funny thing about living through one of those big historical events–it’s hard to see beyond the present to even guess what the world will be like when we come out on the other side. The only things we can do is take care of each other in the now, do the best we can, hang in there, and hope that the coming years will bring better things.