For the Love of Words: January 2021

Some months go by fast, some go slow. January was both. January dealt me blow after blow, leaving me anxious to flip the calendar. Then I think about everything that happened in the world and in my life and some of those things, like the insurrection at the capitol, or the crazy snow day here in Austin, they feel like they happened a few months ago, not a month ago. Cognitively speaking, I’m curious what is happening to my brain and if this struggle to correctly remember lengths of time is just me getting older (I say like I’m in my 60s, not 27) or because of the pandemic and the insane amount of time I’ve spent alone in the last eleven months.

With all this time alone in my apartment, I would hope to get a lot of writing done. I’ve been wrong. It took me seven months to finish a draft, which normally would have taken half the time. It finally happened though, after seven months, on a snow day unlike any other snow day I’ve seen in Austin, I wrote the last few thousand words of *Hit List.*

At 90,311 words, this draft was the longest I’ve ever finished and now I wonder if I can aim for 100,000 on the next new draft.

In typical millennial fashion, I am feeling the burnout. I feel the burnout just from the last year, even before the pandemic. Since January 2020, I moved in the middle of the month, during some really stressful times in work, I was sick multiple times in February while trying to adjust to living alone, and just as I felt better….BOOM…. the world fell apart.

I found this tweet last week about pandemic fine. I have a job that pays me well, and I am incredibly grateful for that, we experienced a ton of growth in this pandemic. Growth that we were not staffed for, and the burnout of it is hard.

The burnout has affected my writing. But this job pays the bills, writing doesn’t right now, though I’m confident at some point it will. I’m not there yet, but I want to take time this year to take myself on a writing retreat. Book a hotel room and hole up there for a weekend to just write instead of trying to write, do the dishes, clean the bookshelves and take the trash out.

I talked about writing goals last week, and this year I want to be smart about my goals with writing. Gone are the days where I could write 10,000 words in a day for fun. They were gone before the pandemic but I just want to be smarter and kinder to myself this year.

The writing is a part of that. The writing will still keep going though.