Looking Back at 2020

December 31, 2020

Today, I highlight the date because it’s a cold, rainy morning in Austin, Texas. It seems like fitting weather for the year that was. If I were to dig deeply, there are a lot of negatives I could recap. That would bring up the pain that all of us have felt over the last year. That sentence probably summarizes my lack of active blogging, for the most part, the last half of the year.

I always have the desire to write. There are many days that I have had my computer up and running, a blank document on the screen, writing a lot of words. I never feel like I’m accomplishing the tone that I want, so a lot of times those words are just lost into the “Drafts” folder of my writing workflow. My “ideas” folder has about 800 thoughts that range from a single sentence to a few thousand words, but I never move them over to the “Works In Progress” folder. I still love to write. I still love to see words on “paper” representing my thoughts.

This year has been hard, for all of us. We’ve adjusted to new ways to live. In my case, I count myself amongst the very lucky that my workload has increased and I’ve taken on new responsibilities for my team, and grown my team. I get to work from home everyday. The challenge is that everyday is now way too often including weekends. I completed the largest project I’ve ever been involved in. It’s been a great year for my job.

Simply put, 2020, 1 star, would not recommend.

-Naughty

Part of my job, and the part I enjoy, is traveling the world, meeting people and gaining an understanding of their needs and where my team can assist. I’ve done this since I was 18, and I’m not a lot of years of experience into that method of working. It’s strange to talk to people at all hours of the day and night, via video conferencing software, and have some of these same conversations, and try to get the same results. It’s maybe 80% as effective, which means that 20% of the details I would have gotten, are just lost on the wire between us.

We just celebrated Christmas, for the first time in my life I did not travel back to the place of my origin and see all of my family and friends. Not that many would have shown up for family gatherings of more than a few people.

I really hadn’t planned to do a look back at 2020, it still makes me sore to think about. The last few weeks have just been hard. The last few months have been hard.

The Future

Without promising anything, some personal goals below:

• My favorite memes still run, weekly and I plan to get back to being active in participating, and most importantly in commenting on all of the great writers there.

• There are 807 story ideas sitting in my “Ideas” folder as of this morning and I add about 20-30 a day. Focusing on moving from generating ideas and moving more ideas to “Works in Process” will be a goal. Using those ideas for plots, plot twists, and general background is part of that.

• My life being as unpredictable as it is at this moment, I won’t resolve to write more, I simply can’t. When our lives, return to a more steady state, I hope to be in a place where I can. There is currently a work in progress with over 20,000 words and many chapters that I want to wrap up the first draft of. Then I’ll sit down to edit, and publish each of those chapters to my blog and hope that everyone that reads it enjoys it as much as I am.

Leave comments, send messages, I love them. In fact, send comments and messages to all of your favorite bloggers. Speaking for them, just this once, I promise you we do this because we love it, but sometimes a few words can keep people going. Sometimes a few words can keep people going for more than just what they write about in their blog.

With that, 2020 can fall behind us, and with time we can start to filter out the negative from that view. As 2021 progresses, we will all remember that there was some bad stuff, but we will all remember that 2020 also brought us some great memories, and changed our lives in good ways as well.

Stay safe, live the life you are meant to live.

-naughty

Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay