A Year of Writing

Fri Dec 31 2021

This year was a bit of an odd one for me.

One of my goals this year was to develop my personal writing. To do this I pledged privately to myself to write at least once per week.

And to my great surprise, I actually did that. If you go back and look, I’ve written something once a week, usually published on Fridays, for an entire year now.

It’s been an interesting journey, trying to come up with something to write every week. Some weeks I would write ahead early, trying to create a buffer for myself. But I found that my easiest writing came in the days leading up to Friday. When I knew I needed to publish something, my brain just clicked and wrote something out on its own, it seemed like.

Most of the writing wasn’t very good, I’ll admit. Some of it was okay though, and I suppose I couldn’t ask for anything more: that I don’t cringe when I read it again. Here’s actually some of my favorite work:

As for next year, I’ll probably take a break from this weekly schedule, as it’s not something I can sustain long term. It was a nice experiment for the year 2021, though I still have a few ideas to explore, and I may even turn out the odd video.

In the New Year

I have a few aspirations for the new year. I hesitate to call them resolutions, because I’ve never done well with those. I like that 2021 was the year I took writing a bit more seriously. For this year, I think I want to try new things that put me a bit out of my comfort zone.

Something else I’d like to do is to begin using my new Framework as my daily driver laptop. It’s been a bit difficult to move away from my MacBook Pro, simply because I’m so used to how I did things there. I’m finding it difficult to adjust to new ways of thinking and new workflows. But I think I’m getting there, and next year is when I plan to put it all into practice.

Another aspiration I have is to learn a new language of some sort. I’ve settled on Mandarin, mostly because my wife speaks it. I’m also going to try to pick up Latin once more. I had taken it when I was in middle school and high school, but I’ve probably forgotten most of it.

Something else I’ve done over this past year is to delve once more into my fiction writing. I used to write a lot more on my own personal fantasy stories, but sometime over the years I stopped, as so often happens. But this year, I’ve managed to keep somewhat to a schedule, if not a weekly schedule. I think there’s just something about my brain that needs a weekly deadline to write.

In any case, I’m writing a story called The Impossible Children. It’s a middle grade portal fantasy about a young girl on an adventure through many different worlds. I may talk about it here a bit more in the future, but in the meantime, you can catch a new chapter every week, or as often as I can do every week.