With Christmas and New Year's Day having fallen on Fridays this year, I don't know whether I'm coming or going at this point. On the one hand, I don't really take vacations anymore, as it just doesn't make sense for my writing career right now. That makes the occasional long weekend extra important, though, and I've realized just how badly I needed some downtime these past couple of weeks.
Naturally, 2020 was stressful for me for all the same reasons it was stressful for everyone. But it's also been a very productive year for me personally. I never would have seen that coming at this same time last year, but it just goes to show you that you never know what's around the corner. It does pay to hang in there and keep trucking, even when you're sure you're not getting anywhere.
In fact, the past twelve months have done something for me that I wasn't sure could be done after well over a decade of full-time professional writing. It gave me new reasons to get excited about sitting down to write, as well as new chances to do precisely the kind of writing I've always wanted to do as far as my living goes. I'm currently working on becoming my own version of Carrie Bradshaw, and it's been both fun and lucrative so far -- a winning combination if ever there was one.
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Our Christmas and New Year's celebrations were blissfully low-key. I slow-cooked a ham for Christmas and made pork chops with homemade mac and cheese, black-eyed peas, and collard greens for New Year's. I also baked for a change -- gingerbread for Christmas and sugar cookies for New Year's. I often forget just how special homemade baked goods can make a holiday, but I enjoyed them immensely this year -- both the baking and the eating.
Seth and I spent our time enjoying being together, as well as catching up on movies and television we'd missed in recent months and years. We watched HBO's Chernobyl, which we just finished last night. We also watched an absolutely fantastic movie called I'm Thinking of Ending Things. It was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, the same writer responsible for another long-time favorite of mine -- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things was wonderfully surreal, strange, and dreamlike. As such, it reminds me strongly of the kinds of stories I wrote this past November when I was doing NaNoWriMo. When I'm in the thick of my writing, everything makes sense and seems entirely entertaining to me, but there's also this little voice in the back of my head that keeps going: "Who the fuck else is ever going to want to read this? It's so weird." Then I never quite get around to doing anything with the stories because I'm sure they just wouldn't appeal to the average person.
Movies like this one make me realize I'm probably wrong. Many scenes from this film reminded me either of things I've already written or ideas I have kicking around in my head to work on at some point in the future. The ice cream shop, in particular, made me remember one of the potential story ideas I never quite got around to working on in November -- a bizarre diner that was open 24/7 and the odd people who ate there. Now I'm just itching to revisit it and to stick my toe back into fiction writing soon.
In fact, that's one thing I'd really like to work on in 2021 -- finding some outlets for my short fiction and poetry. Until this past NaNoWriMo, I'd genuinely forgotten how big a part of my writing identity those things used to be. I certainly didn't expect to find the urges to produce them alive and well to the extent that I did. I'm glad, though. As much as I love blogging and informative writing, it's not the extent of what I'm capable of as a writer by a long shot. I just need to figure out how I want to introduce other people to this part of who I am and how my mind works.
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