The Year Ahead

I’m not posting about resolutions or goals – but rather a state of mind.

One of the things that got me through 2023’s ups and downs (and honestly several years of the ugly divorce) was daydreaming about what my ideal life would look like. Especially once I got to my house.

Newsflash: I’m in my house! Finally!

My ideal life is so close…

What do I want every single day to look like? How do I want to feel? What do I want to spend my time doing? That’s what I’m focusing on this year. I’m almost there already. Getting my house next to Dad’s and Molly’s was Phase I. If all goes according to plan, Phase II will wrap up by the end of 2025. Though I can’t say more about that yet.

So now that I’m here, living my ideal life as closely as possible, what do I want my days to look like? What can I control? What can I do to get closer every single day to Phase II?

While assessing where I am and what I accomplished in 2023, I realized that I’d fallen into some temporary thinking and habits. The house we lived in was temporary. Staying with Dad–temporary. Even before we moved out of Nixa, I was just waiting for the divorce to finalize so I could move on with my life. So those years of court limbo were also temporary.

Honestly, even many years of marriage were temporary. I was in survival mode. I shut down a lot of the things I wanted to do, even to the point of stifling who I was as a person. Just to survive another year.

Goddess willing, I’m not moving from this house until they bury me. This is permanent. NO MORE TEMPORARY THINKING ALLOWED. I’m not in survival mode now. I’m in THRIVE mode.

It’s time to get back to my permanent routines that maximize my time and health so I can do this writing gig for a very long time.

Way back about a million years–it seems–I used to write dark & early. I’d be up before anyone in the house and get at least one writing session done before anyone else was up. That way, no matter how shitty the day ended up being, at least I’d already written something.

I’m going to do my best to re-establish this kind of routine, though I must admit mornings are hard for me. This is going to take some time to adjust. One thing I learned from last year was that sometimes very simple rewards are enough to start a new routine. Thanks to the sticker reward, I stuck with my planner all of 2023 – except July/August got a little away from me while I was deep in the move.

My reward for getting up at the butt-crack of dawn is going to be tarot and this cute little stamp set I got. In addition to my Agendio that I reordered with some minor modifications, I added the Writual planner and acrylic stamp set to my morning routine.

I fell in love with the round tarot cards at the beginning of the divorce nightmare. I told this story in the Triune group, so I won’t get into the details here. But I had a memorable reading and immediately bought my own set of Motherpeace cards. I have many (several) other tarot sets I may use occasionally but I tend to come back to Motherpeace. They just fit too well into Shara’s mythos to NOT use.

My 2024 plan is to focus primarily on Shara, though inevitably I’m going to end up crossing over into Karmen and Helayna’s stories at some point. I really wanted to have those trilogies finished before I tackled Shara, but I’m just too far behind to keep waiting. At one point last week while I was prepping everything I had all three projects open at the same time. I may do that several times over the next few months!

The other project I’d really like to get back to is continuing The Vicious with Dig the Graves. But Shara will be my priority indefinitely. Of course I’d love to make progress (finally) with Blizzard Bound as well. We’ll see how that goes!

I don’t usually post word count goals either, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is going to be one of my biggest years yet. I’m shooting for 90k a quarter, 360k words for the year. We’ll see if I can do it.