“Late for Leaving”

tyunglebower ♦ December 19, 2017 ♦ Leave a comment

Before my time, my mother worked with this guy who would often leave early on his  lunch break, stay away for three hours, and come back about 30 minutes before the end of the work day. Usually he would mention that he did this because he didn’t want to be “late for leaving.”

There’s a bit of a parallel between that and this blog as we all get set for Christmas, and the end of 2017. After a not-entirely-planned hiatus of two months, I could say I’ve at last check back in to write a post or two so I wouldn’t be late for leaving 2017.

I do plan to post several more times before the actual end of this year, and probably more often than I would during a twelve day span any other time of the year.

But on the whole, 2017 has been a year of being off track on my public writing goals. So much so that I used Nanowrimo last month informally, so as to kickstart a stalled goal of having a rough draft of Novel Four completed by the end of the year. It seems to have worked, as I not only made the 50K words, but the end of the draft is in sight.

If I manage to get it done, it would be one of the few writing goals I set for myself at the start of the year that I achieved as intended.

Not that writing a novel is a small feat. It’s not, believe me. But I had hoped to have far more short stories written this year.

However, I have been journalling this year again, which I do off and on throughout my life. Though for my eyes only, the pages of those journals do constitute writing. The distillation of feelings or observations or longing or all of the above plus into coherent sentences on the page is no doubt useful, even if it is in atrocious handwriting, with the awkward structures left in. It is for this reason that I am perhaps not as hard on myself about missing my productivity goals in writing this year as I otherwise might have been. (Though I am still not thrilled.)

But it happens, and in the end, a set of essays and a novel published this year, even if not totally written this year, cannot be ignored when I look back on the last 11.5 months or so.

My inner editor has been a bit more active this year than it has in a while for my fiction. Also, in general I have been more tired on the whole this year than in previous years. But as it does  little-to-no good to lambaste one’s self over such things, and given that one should remember, as I have often told others, that to get any writing done at all is no insignificant feat, I shall consider this post the official end of any sanctioned guilt I place upon myself for what I have and have not gotten done. The rest of the entries this month/year will be more proactive.

For in the end, what choice does a writer have but to be proactive?