I’ve never quite subscribed to the “newness” of beginning a new year, because it’s really just another day. I do, however, understand the idea of finding reasons for a fresh start. Whether I think it’s an artificial construct or not is immaterial – if it’s helpful, it’s helpful. I’m using the start of this new year not (entirely) to change old bad habits, but instead to reinforce good ones and continue the new path I set myself on at the beginning of 2013.
2013 was a fantastic year for me. In truth, I have to encompass November and December of 2012 into my “2013”, because that’s when my wife and I bought our first house. We just celebrated our first full year of home-ownership, and that feels fantastic.
The purchase of the house has allowed me to rekindle some interests that had fallen by the wayside. I’m an avid poker player, but my home game had suffered for a few years. In the new space I’ve been able to breathe new life into the game, and now it’s a weekly Friday night fixture. Being huge geeks, as well, we’ve started the same thing for our waning board game habit. We absolutely love traditional games – board games, card games, RPG’s, and their ilk – but struggled to get any regular group together to play. That’s starting to change now, and it feels great.
We celebrated our 15th anniversary in November, and did so in style, spending almost a month road-tripping through Australia from Sunshine Coast (about an hour north of Brisbane) to Port Campbell (about 3 hours southwest of Melbourne), before wrapping up the trip in Melbourne and Auckland, New Zealand. It was, without question, the best vacation of my life (just edging out a two-week trip to Europe we took in the summer of 2012).
I finished writing my first novel and sent it to beta readers, and am now incorporating their feedback into the fourth draft. I began work on the second novel in the same series, and have begun querying agents in an attempt to get traditionally published.
For the first several months after leaving my day job, I concentrated really hardcore on writing, and succeeded in finishing, revising, and re-revising a novel. In the last several months of the year? Not so much. It’s now my time to find not only the creative juices that drove that push, but to reinforce the daily writing habits that helped it to be successful. I’ve begun building a routine at home for maintaining our house and being a stay-at-home husband. Every chore I complete is one that my wife doesn’t have to, so now that she’s bringing home the bacon, I repay her by giving her more free time away from work. I’ve been able to concentrate more on Trade Secrets, my comic book podcast, so that we are on a more definitive schedule and don’t have nearly as many interruptions. All of these are habits that I want to reinforce, and they all basically boil down to concentration, devotion, and routine.
Of course, these good habits were balanced by one fairly bad one.
Over the last year, I found myself more and more inured to the instant gratification provided by social media feedback. I put out a post, and instantly get Likes or Favorites or Shares or ReTweets, and that gratification almost became an addiction. My attention span shortened and I became unable to wait for delayed gratification of any kind. I’d be reading a book or playing a video game, and find myself pausing every 20 minutes or between every chapter to check Facebook or Twitter, breathlessly waiting for the refresh to show me that I had new Notifications or Connections.
Those little micro-gratifications were becoming an outright interruption to almost everything I did, and eroded my sense of accomplishment in anything real or lasting. Tasks began to take longer because I needed to check my feeds with regularity, and constantly stepping away from long-form tasks to log into Twitter screwed with my ability to focus. It was almost like developing ADHD.
I don’t want it to seem like I’m putting down social media. I love it. LOVE IT. It’s given me the chance to interact with people I never would have before, and I’ve made some genuine friends online whom I never would have met otherwise. I’d never give it up entirely, but I found that my patience, focus, and attention span were all severely suffering. And those are pretty much the three most important things for a writer to be successful.
The one thing I know about my personality is that if something isn’t working for me, I have trouble easing off. It’s easier for me to quit things cold-turkey and slowly re-introduce them after their influence has been lessened or broken. So that’s what January is for me: my cold-turkey social media detox. I’m going to take a month to re-learn what it means to wait for things and accomplish goals without constant interruption, all the while reinforcing the traits and habits that made 2013 so great for me. Hopefully when February rolls around, I’ll be able to reintroduce Facebook and Twitter in small increments, and eventually find a real balance with them back in my routine.
I’ve had some really shitty years in the past. Between 2007 and 2010, I had lost a couple of friends and hit some really rocky patches with others, had been passed over for several jobs, had lost my way creatively, I had lost both of my parents, and I was mired in the fallout from those deaths. If 2013 has taught me anything, it’s this very simple lesson:
It gets better.
I hope you all had a great 2013. If not, then I hope you’re looking forward to 2014 and beyond. Happy new year!
