Holidaze 2022
Surviving trying to have fun this holiday season and planning 2023
Friends, it’s the end of the year (somehow) and I’m working on plans for next year. It’s a tricky thing, planning. The unexpected crops up all the time. We’ve spent more than half this year dealing with injuries. Caring for a family member inevitably shifts my focus and plans. Add in a tripledemic, the possibility of MERS-CoV recombining with SARS-CoV-2, certain corporations using inflation as a cover to raise prices, and the crushing disappointment I felt watching Black Adam—it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and start down the happiest little doomscroller path.
Pandemic Stories
Years ago I wrote a novel about a pandemic (unpublished) that didn’t directly kill people, but it sufficiently disrupted the normal networks that we depend on—transportation, water, power, economic systems, etc.,—that people died and civilization basically collapsed. In the novel the collapse happened pretty quickly.
It’d be a different novel if I wrote it today. Our son had surgery and the hospital didn’t have the over-the-counter pain meds he needed, neither did local stores (but there’s no shortage). The Kaiser pharmacy did, thankfully our nurse said something in time for me to get there before closing. The next day I went to several stores looking for pill crushers because he had trouble swallowing the meds. It worked out. He’s actually learned to swallow the pills. Still, even on a small scale disruption like we’re seeing, I’d write the book differently now. Except I wouldn’t write it.
Not right now. It’s too soon for me. I’d rather write a ghost story. It might be scary, but it’s the sort of scary that is a refuge from pandemics and the rise of fascism. A good haunting can be fun, oddly enough. I’ve written about my love of Darcy Coates’s books. It’s encouraged me to write my own ghost stories, including my most recently published novel, Infestation.
I’m planning the release of a couple other haunting novels and a novella in 2023.
Granted, not a “holiday” title. For that, you’d need to take a look at my novel Europan Holiday, which is a weird and wacky sort of book published a few years ago.
I had fun writing both books—and the upcoming ghost stories—and that’s at the heart of my plans for 2023.
Planning 2023
It’s fair to say that I didn’t meet the challenges I set for myself in 2022. I’m okay with it. I accomplished some of the things I wanted. I wrote some stories, published a few, worked on a novel, and spent time focused on improving my artwork and knowledge of Blender. That said, I’ve spent some time looking at the data on how I spent my year.
And here’s the thing: 29% of my time was spent on Entertainment. Sort of. That doesn’t count all of time spent doing my work as a librarian / IT Specialist / data analyst because my work machine isn’t tracked the way I track my time spent on my other devices. And if I don’t remember to enter offline time, it isn’t tracked either, e.g., using my Freewrite to work on a story or book. Nor does it include time spent offline with my family unless I make an effort to enter it.
Still.
The top three entertainment activities: YouTube (52%), Minecraft (19%), and Netflix (19%). Granted, some of the YouTube time was spent learning, researching, and planning to launch my YouTube channel. Even so, this category shows me that I have plenty of time—even with a full-time job and taking care of my family—to take some risks and tackle some challenges with my writing and other creative activities.
Considering all of the data and thinking about the things I want to do, I created a new page in Notion to both plan and track my progress. At the core of the plan—a calendar with gold stars. Except they’re colored squares (unless it’s really something special).
That’s too small to read, but that’s okay. The main point here is that we have:
A key defining the ‘stickers’ that I’ll use on the calendar.
A yearly calendar with a row for each quarter.
A list of Activities and a list of Dreams.
And a section for monthly evaluations at the bottom.
I also added a calendar for December at the top to start testing out the plan before the year started. I like calendars. I’ve done some similar things in the past using different tools.
Today, for example, I spent time on courses ⏹ and it’s a day to send out a newsletter 🟥. The 🔲 indicates no progress made on days when I planned to work on things. Other squares indicate days to publish 🟦, upload merch designs 🟪, or days when I’ve met my fiction writing goal 🟩. There’s more in the key, but that probably conveys the basic concept. The stickers can indicate something planned if on the calendar ahead, or something accomplished if on a day in the past. Days that I plan to take off are simply left blank.
Activities & Dreams
I have my activities (things in my control) and dreams (things not in my control) lists beneath the calendar. Many of the stickers relate to the activities. The 🌟 emoji indicates when I’ve achieved one of the items on the dream list.
Activities include things like sending out short stories or artwork to professional magazine markets. A dream includes things like selling/licensing a story or artwork to Analog Science Fiction & Fact. It’s totally within my control to write stories, create illustrations, and submit those to the magazine. The editor controls whether or not what I’ve created is included in the magazine. The dream is part of a longstanding bigger dream to become a regular contributor to Analog and other top markets.
It’s possible to finish the year without achieving any of the things on my dream list without it meaning failure. I might also rethink and add or substract items from the list during the year.
I can fail at the items on the activities list by not doing them. That’s up to me. Do I want to watch another art process video on YouTube, or record my own video? Write my own story, or spend more time in Minecraft? (Though I do want to go to the End and beat the Ender dragon in survival mode because I’ve never done that).
Evaluation
The monthly evaluation section is also important. It’s an opportunity to sit down and reflect on the progress I’ve made in the month, the activities I’ve completed, and consider any changes to the plan. Maybe I decide things are going fine. Maybe I decide I need to risk more and get more accomplished. The evaluation can be about specific activities, but also questions around what I’ve learned and how I’ve improved my craft.
What are your plans for 2023? Are you taking on any new risks or challenges?
With that, thank you for reading. I wish you a happy and healthy end of the year, birth of a new year. Take care.
Best wishes, always—Ryan