Author Check-in, January 2017

I need to acknowledge, both publicly and to myself, that I really am not good at blogging.

I know: obvious statement of the year, right? I should know this by now. I have, after all, been maintaining on-and-off web presences in various forms and on various places around the internet since the dinosaur era, when blogs were called “online journals,” and we uploaded individual entries through FTP and linked together each page by hand. Never have I been good at it.

And yet, every time I try again, I swear that I will completely revamp all of my habits, that this time I will maintain a steady schedule, that this will be the moment that I finally step into my own. Only to fail and fail again, like New-Year’s dieters who try to change their entire eating and exercise habits all at once. Instead of being reasonable with myself, and acknowledging that the only way that I have ever managed to build or change habits long-term is by taking the tiniest, most gradual steps in the right direction. Eat fewer pizza rolls in a sitting, not none. Exercise for ten minutes, not an hour. We are, by nature, fundamentally lazy creatures who do not like change—so why is it, really, that we insist that the only meaningful changes we will accept are the ones that happen overnight?

With that in mind, I am going to try to publish one blog post a month, although I will happily accept it if I manage to make one every other month. There—surely that is not so lofty a goal that I will crash into the bar I have set for myself, right? And I know that I have a history of having publicly-stated goals backfire on me, so I know that I am taking a bit of a chance here, but I also know that I hate being one of those authors that just goes completely silent on all forms of social media for months and months and months on end with no discernible reason to explain it. This post, then, is for the readers like me: I am here. I am always still here, I am always still working, even when I am neurotic and shy and my introverted need for solitude and silence stifles my public responsibility to keep my own readers informed. Also, I’m sorry about that, I know how it sucks.

So. It’s a fresh year, a fresh start. Or so they say—I approach 2017 relieved to have the past behind me, but wary for the future. Both the fourth book of the Beacon Campaigns and the promised YA-standalone are still in active production, although (I’ll be honest), calling them “active” has been a bit of a stretch lately. I’ve been struggling to be creative at all ever since the election, something that I hesitate to admit here because, as a general rule, I try to keep politics out of this space. But the impact that this has had, even just on a personal level, is very real and it’s been very difficult to work forward from there. Not to mention that my part-time job swallowed me whole throughout the holiday season, and this year I was glad to let it. I’ve wrapped myself in a protective layer just to get through the last two months, but now I am standing on the edge of a brand new year—a terrifying, sprawling, twelve-month sea of uncertainty churning before me—and I know that I need to get back to work, but I am not sure how.

I will figure it out. Eventually. But for now… I don’t know. Just keep trying, I suppose, until something works, or until the sheer amount of effort creates its own kind of momentum. In the meantime, like I said, I’m still here. And onward we go, I suppose.