Only a short one today – I’ve only got a few minutes before I need to leave. I just wanted to get this one out on time, before it’s officially too late.
I also don’t want to spend a lot of time on this one because while I usually enjoy the process of coming up with a name for the New Year, in Australia it sort of hasn’t felt like a New Year. I don’t know how many people who read this blog know this, but if not most then a truly significant portion of NSW and Victoria is currently on fire. It’s been that way for several weeks now and the firefighters have been fighting an uphill battle just to get some of the fires under control. My blog is not the place to list and read all the details and the horrors; I’ve not been in the affected areas and other people have more accurate information. I just won’t be really considering 2020 to be a ‘new year’ until it’s stopped feeling like the country is holding its breath.
But in the interest of having a place to start when that … well, it won’t be truly ‘over’ when the fires are gone, not by a long shot. When things have shifted from emergency to rebuilding, perhaps. When that happens, this is both a new year and a new decade. I had trouble thinking of what to call this year, too, because it feels like a lot of what I plan this year has already been covered in previous years. When I started this tradition, I sort of had this idea that every year would be doing something at least different enough that I could come up with creative names for essentially the same process (I was under no illusions that adult life would not involve doing very similar things again and again). This year is sort of an upgrade of the Year of Consolidation from a couple years back, where I planned to do the same things but do them better and with a deeper understanding of what exactly I was doing. This year, the plan is to try and get to more conventions, start figuring out which ones are the best ones to be attending, extend myself more in terms of works published (last year I ended up having to wait on some progress for various reasons, which is why there weren’t that many new announcements last year), and also on a personal level, start changing my daily routine so that I am better at getting out and keeping up with weekly exercise and social commitments.
So I’m calling this ‘the Year of Timing’. This is the year where I’ll get better at doing things on time and better at organising things so that they happen on schedule.
So that’s this year. Post upcoming about changes to the blog structure and schedule. In the meantime, hope everyone stays safe.
Whimsy and Metaphor 