Where Are You?

It’s been a weird post-Nanowrimo couple of weeks.

First off, where am I?

I’m letting my finished Nano project “gel,” so that when I come back to it for the next steps, I’ll see it with fresh eyes. In the meantime, the Christmas season has somehow snuck up on me, so this breather has been oddly frenetic. Gift shopping has been strange, for reasons I don’t have to elaborate on. In short, all hands of real life have been on deck.

In the mix, I’ve stumbled headlong into a project idea that I don’t think I’ll be able to let lie. It’s a bit of a scary project, ambitious, and will take a delicate hand to pull off in the way that I envision. I hope that I’m up to the task. It’s the earliest days of this project, still, very much incubating this concept. Shoot, it may not come to anything at all in the end. Despite the lack of prose on screen at this point, I am excited by this concept. I hope to share more as the brainstorming and “what if” questions grow into a real story. I’ve also, maybe, found the missing ingredient that might help me rescue a long-dormant project from oblivion. I’m facing a lot of directions that I could go with longer projects and battling some real analysis paralysis.

All the pondering about these potential longer-form projects has taken bandwidth from my short-fiction focused process of the past year. I find myself wrestling attention back to creating shorter form pieces, sending short fiction submissions, and, of course, drafting blog posts.

Sprinkled on top of it all is the general wind-down of a very strange year. Some things never change, and I still have a few personal admin tasks to wrap up for this year and prepare for next year.

A Kick in the Pants

I’ve strayed back into podcast-land during all of these goings-on, and tripped over a couple of excellent interviews with the great Seth Godin, in which he discusses his new book The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. This was a timely reminder for me, the perfect kick in the pants. It is just the memo that I needed about the ultimate importance of sitting down, showing up, and doing the work, whatever the endeavor. Of course, the book is on my post-holiday shopping list, but in the meantime, I’m taking the lessons of the conversations I’ve heard to heart as I look ahead to my practice in 2021. Take a listen to these interviews with Marie Forleo and Tom Bilyeu. There’s something here for every creative, whether you’re an established creator, trying to break into the market, or ever considered what your hobby might bring to the world.

In a (near) future post, I’ll go into more detail about the gameplan that these ideas have spurred me to start creating. I took some serious steps in my creative journey in 2020, and 2021 is going to be the year to level up, come hell or high water. Or whatever other substance the universe should choose to sling.

So, Where are You?

This brings me back to the title of this post. Where are you, as this wild ride of a year winds to a close? Wherever you are, I hope that you are keeping up, finding inspiration, and courageously embarking on your practice every day.