Category: end of year

Year’s End View IV

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Image courtesy of K-On!

First things first: END OF YEAR BOOK SALE!

Want some free e-books? My novels are currently available for free over at Smashwords until the end of the year! That’s all three books in the Bridgetown Trilogy, Meet the Lidwells!, and In My Blue World, available in all formats. Go on, you know you want them!

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I’ve been thinking about new year’s resolutions lately. I mean, I always think of them this time of year, as one usually does, and wonder about which ones I’ve reached with confidence, ones that fell by the wayside for one reason or another, ones I’d completely forgotten about before the year was up, and ones I’m still working on. Some years it’s on a personal and soulful level: getting out of an emotional, mental or professional rut I’d found myself in, training myself not to fall so easily into bitter moods, things like that. And some years it’s goal-oriented: finishing and self-publishing that novel, submitting that story, uploading those pictures, expanding my musical or writing knowledge.

One resolution I thought of recently was about facing personal fears and breaking myself out of the habit of the reactions they cause. Whether it’s about job searching or submitting my novels, or hell, even outwardly showing more emotions than I have in the past, I know a lot of these are what I call stupid fears. Things I could easily face and conquer, if only I break out of the lifelong habit of automatically sliding into them. Sure, some of it is due to patriarchal training (the ‘boys aren’t supposed to show weakness’ of yore) and self-destructive listlessness (the ‘why even bother’ response, in other words), but come on: these are things I could break myself out of if I tried. And kept at it.

I’d like to think that I’ve done a lot of that over the years and I’m not nearly as bad as I used to be, but yeah, those reactions are still there, partly out of passivity and partly because I’m so used to it that I slide into it before I can even stop myself. And yes, this is why one of my personal mantras has been just shut the fuck up and DO it already. It’s amazing what I can accomplish if I just tell that passive, negative, stoic and fearful side of me to zip it and take the plunge in the next breath.

I suppose I could say that will be one of my resolutions for 2022. I don’t really have an exact wording for it, but I don’t think it’s something that I need to give a name to. It’s something I know is there and it’s something I’m tired of leaning on, and it’s time for it to be gone. And there’s a secondary part to that equation as well: what takes its place? Confidence? Sure, but what kind? I think the kind I’m looking for is the one where I don’t need it to prove anything to anyone, or to get away with something, or any other kind like that. Just a simple and positive ‘yeah, let’s make this happen’ kind.

As long as it points me in the right direction.

Year’s End View III

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

First things first: END OF YEAR BOOK SALE!

Want some free e-books? My novels are currently available for free over at Smashwords until the end of the year! That’s all three books in the Bridgetown Trilogy, Meet the Lidwells!, and In My Blue World, available in all formats. Go on, you know you want them!

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Some ends of the year have a feeling of finality, while others tend to feel more like transition points, at least for me, anyway. I was thinking about December of 2001 the other day of all things, still trying to process recent lifechanging events while still continuing my ongoing habit of stopping at Newbury Comics for cd purchases. The single for The Church’s “Numbers” pops into mind, the first cd I’d bought that actually said “(c) 2002” even though it had dropped a few weeks before New Year’s Eve. I suppose I thought of it because it signified a sign of something new.

I still embrace using New Year’s Eve and Day as a way to kick off personal change of some sort. I’m not about making Best Laid Plan resolutions, nor am I one to do the “maybe I’ll learn a new language/teach myself chess/climb Mount Everest/etc” bucket list sort of resolution, either. My resolutions are more about allowing myself the time, patience and headspace to start some kind of new process or project I’ve been wanting to start. They’re also about bettering myself on personal levels, usually working via my whiteboard calendar and daily schedule.

I’d say the end of 2021 has felt more like a transition point than a finality. I mean, my life’s always felt like that, really, but this time out it’s been much more like I know what journey I’m on right now instead of flailing my way in some vague direction. I spent a lot of 2021 knowing what I wanted to do, what I wanted to achieve. I didn’t finish any of it, at least in the sense that I’m still working on it. What’s important here is that they’re moving.

As long as I keep moving, I’m going in the right direction.

Year’s End View II

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

First things first: END OF YEAR BOOK SALE!

Want some free e-books? My novels are currently available for free over at Smashwords until the end of the year! That’s all three books in the Bridgetown Trilogy, Meet the Lidwells!, and In My Blue World, available in all formats. Go on, you know you want them!

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So. What else has been on my mind this year? Well, something dark and dreary. With sunlight at the end.

I have an extremely terrible and self-sabotaging habit of planning (and often overplanning, and overthinking) but not always following through. Most times I will, but when it truly counts it doesn’t always measure up to the hype I try to make myself believe. Whether it’s high standards, perfectly nailing the landing or realizing there’s a shit-ton more work I need to do before I get to where I’m happy with it, it rarely pans out the way I hope. I’ll get frustrated and wonder why I’m even trying. Or the opposite: I’ll think I’m at a really great level but get told that my standards need to be higher.

I also have an extremely terrible and self-sabotaging habit of deferring to the happiness of others, often to the detriment of my own. I know I’ve spoken of this before. It’s just the way I wired myself as a kid and I’ve spent most of my life ignoring it or working around it instead of trying to do a major rewiring job instead. Because, y’know, feeling guilty about changing myself might bother someone else’s image of me. Big words, coming from someone who’s been a big fan of nonconformity since they first discovered college radio as a teenager in the 80s, yeah? It’s one of my life’s biggest paradoxes.

So what does this have to do with 2021? I gave it a name this year: anxiety. I decided, why not call it what it is, instead of trying to paint it as something else less scary? It isn’t crippling, thankfully. At least not anymore. [There’s a reason I don’t talk or think about the details of my life in the early to mid 90s all that much other than when music is involved, or just to acknowledge that yeah, that was a dark time for me.] It’s a part of me I’ve always thought was a bit broken. Not dangerously so, and I’ve created healthy workarounds that keep me running at a decent speed. Not always at everyone else’s most of the time, but enough to keep up when needed. I don’t take anything for this, as I don’t feel I need to, though I do notice that my blood pressure meds did somewhat chill it out a bit, which helps.

My point being: I’ve played mental and emotional games with myself for years to remain functional. And in the last four or five years I’ve fixed a lot of those issues, and 2021 was the year in which a lot of those games finally came to a close. I don’t need to depend on them anymore. I can face whatever personal demons that might still linger, and I feel all the better for it when I’ve conquered them, or sent them packing. Or more often, just let them vanish like ash in the wind.

I still have a long way to go. I still have a few self-built barriers that need to be torn down. But the way keeps getting clearer as time goes on, and that makes it so much easier.

End of Year Planning

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Image courtesy of 5 Centimeters Per Second

It’s now December, which means that I should start thinking seriously about what I want to do for 2022. I’ve got writing plans, of course…I’ll have two books to revise plus a third to shop around, and I’m open for more projects as they arise. I’d really like to drop a few more self-published novels and really sink my teeth into properly marketing them this time out as well. And I’ve been looking into writing-related jobs online as well, and while they’ve kind of been thin on the ground during this season, I’ll be looking deeper and further afield for positions I can handle remotely.

On a personal note, yeah, I’m sure I have a few things I’d like to follow up on. Our local YMCA has just reopened this week (we’re going later on today!) and we’d like to get back into the rhythm of stopping there a few times a week. We still enjoy our walks after work, but it’ll be good to get back to the gym again. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this soon enough…

And I do of course need to get my end-of-year lists and mixtapes together! Every Spotify user has been posting theirs over the last couple of days, but since I so rarely use it, I’ll have to make my own. [Does Media Monkey show me the most plays? Good question, I’ll have to look into that.] And maybe just for fun, I’ll look at my GoodReads list and pick out my favorites of the year. You know me…I always enjoy the year-end countdowns and best-of lists!

In the meantime, however, I’ll keep on working at the pace I’m currently at. It’s well-balanced, keeps me busy during the day, and I’m getting some serious word count done. Maybe a few shifts in the daily schedule here and there, but nothing major. As long as I keep writing!

Post-Holiday Readjustment

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Image courtesy of One Piece

The extended holiday weekend is over and, depending on how you look at it, things are either going back to normal or ramping up. It’s now officially the Christmas season. Local listen-at-work station KOIT has officially gone 24/7 Holiday Music, as they do every December until New Year’s Day. One of our neighbors got their Christmas tree on Sunday and I know this because there’s a trail of needles heading from the front door to the elevator. We’ve yet to put up our own tree (ours is fake and lives in the back closet most of the year), but I’ll most likely do that this week. And we are so well-stocked on turkey leftovers that we’ve been eating turkey wraps the last few days. (Not that I’m complaining.)

Also, I haven’t written any new words at all since last Tuesday, and I’m really itching to get back to it. I’ve been doing another read-through of Theadia (and will most likely do one of Queen Ophelia after I’m done with that one) the last few days and I can’t wait to get back to work. It’s also that time of year where I start thinking about my year-end music lists and mixtapes (I am woefully behind on mixtapes in general, so I may do a few of those this week as well). And it’s time for me to think about what I want and need to do come 2022, personally and professionally.

So it’s not so much post-holiday readjustment as it is mid-holiday readjustment, I suppose. I’m so used to my Decembers being busy as hell so I see no reason why I shouldn’t be busy creatively while I have the time and ability. With the old Former Day Jobs I’d survive them by hyperfocusing on whatever I need to do at that moment — get the new cd releases security-tagged and price-tagged, lay out the pallets for the 8,374,621 candle boxes that will come down only my lane in the next five minutes, figure out whose UrgentPLZHALP email needs to be looked at first, and so on — so I’ve done the same with my writing projects. That way I can start the new year fresh and already revved up and excited to get going.

Whatever is coming next, I’m ready for it.

A year of difference

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A strange year needs a strange anime gif. Source: Nichijou.

It’s definitely been an interesting year for most people. As mentioned over at Walk in Silence, I started 2020 off in a terrible mood, primarily due to the (now Former) Day Job situation. It had taken a lot out of me since returning to the office in November 2019: I was suddenly stripped of most of the quality time I normally used for writing, I was wasting at least two-plus hours on the road a day (not to mention roughly $70 a week on gas and tolls), and to top it all off, the “We’re All a Big Happy Family” Return Plan had actually been more of an “Extremely Poorly Thought Out (If at All) But We Still Have to Hit This Tight Deadline and Be Active On Day One Or Upper Management Will Be Pissed And Oh By the Way Your Desk Is WAY Over In the Middle of F*cking Nowhere and Far Away from the Rest of Your Team and It’s Not Set Up at All and What’s That Noise Oh Yes It’s the Building’s HVAC Fans Right at Your Feet” Plan. It was a complete shitshow and I’d lost almost all faith in the company at that point. By the start of 2020 I was saying hell with it, applying for jobs on my phone, and using the 750 Words site for my writing at work because I just didn’t give a shit anymore.

And then of course, the pandemic happened, and (Former) Day Job couldn’t even handle that right. I gave my two weeks, just as the city, state and country started hunkering down for who knew what. I mean, I’d been wanting to take some mental time off from the job for a few years now (let’s be real, the four weeks of vacation a year really wasn’t cutting it at this point), but I hadn’t expected to have that handed to me like this.

Still. I spent three months not writing. I stopped blogging, journaling, and I closed down the second (paid) 750 Words account. I did some spot-cleaning of Diwa & Kaffi, but that was about it.

I knew I still needed that mental leave of absence, so instead of keeping busy, I decided, let’s not continue the daily stress of having the weight of it all on me if I didn’t need to carry it anymore. I continued to send out the occasional job applications and do a lot of household errands. We went for walks around the neighborhood. We followed the right emergency health guidelines (as did both of our families, thankfully). I knew I was lucky and privileged to be able to pull that off, so I spent that time the best I could. I did a lot of extremely overdue mental, emotional and creative housecleaning.

I picked up the writing again some months later, restarting the 750, the blogs, poetry, artwork, and the journaling. It felt right to do it then, now that my mind and heart were a lot clearer. I started toying around with some story ideas I’d come up with during those final (Former) Day Job days. I found I could focus on my creativity at the levels I wanted and needed to have them at. And I started rethinking about what I’d do for the next Day Job.

So yeah. On the one hand, I could easily say that 2020 was an utter failure because of such low word counts, lack of productivity and not consistently releasing one self-published book a year like I had for the last five years.

But on the other hand, I’d done so much more that was just as important, if not more so: I let myself have a clear mind and a calm heart again. I’d say I still came out on top, which is all I could ask for.

I have some interesting plans for 2021, and I’m looking forward to making them a reality!

Wintertime

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Back in the early 00s, I made it a point to head down to my basement writing nook to get my words done, whatever the weather. I would do this even in the dead of winter, bundled up in layers and a small space heater pointed directly under the desk at my feet. Nothing could stop me from getting my daily thousand words done!

Okay, maybe there were a few days when it was just too cold to stay down there. Those were the days when I’d use the family computer upstairs tucked away in the kitchen pantry. It was a bit uncomfortable as the only chair there was a stool and I slouch terribly when I sit, and I wasn’t always as productive, but at least I was warmer.

Nowadays I’m here in Spare Oom, and it’s one of the coolest rooms in the house at any time of year. The one window faces north so it never gets direct sun, and if there’s any breeze coming off the bay, it hits me first. This is fine during the summer, but in the winter my fingers can get a bit numb. Right now it’s 49 F, I’ve got the floor radiator on, and I’m wearing my house sneakers and the sweater A knitted for me. I’m about to head into the kitchen to make a other pot of coffee in hopes that it’ll help me warm up.

Sure, I’m lucky, considering we don’t get snow, nor does it drop below 40 degrees. No unplowed roads and crappy visibility. (Imagine if it did snow here…this city would be the king of cars-sliding-sideways-down-hilly-streets-and-crashing-into-each-other videos.) I definitely don’t miss any of that at all. We just get a biting chill that we feel in our bones because of the winds coming straight from the Pacific Ocean. One unexpected plus to wearing a pandemic mask outside is that it doubles as a muffler during days like this!

Still, it’s nice to be in a warm room, bashing away at the PC as I try to make those daily words.