Quite honestly a lot happened in this year. Maybe that's why it feels like a blink?

Funnily enough, the past year doesn't even really start in January for me. It starts last November when I left Ambassador International, and my books came back to me, and every single obligation related to my author platform/socials rolled deliberately away in an indescribable, desperately needed wave of respite.

It was an era that coincided with the end of busy/tourist season at my farm market job, and with an extended stay at a my former piano teacher's home in Florida where I spent two weeks feeling as if I had turned the clock back on my life to the quieter days of 2010-12 when all I had to be was the big sister.

Everything hammered home the grateful resolve to take it slow. Take it easy. Take that driven personality and channel it into the writing you've been aching to tend to for years. Savor the energy and focus and sheer renewal that actually lets you pursue that beloved thing.

So I wrote for months.

When I hit a wall with writing, I browsed self-publishing checklists and curated my own. (Small steps. One foot in front of the other. Finding a way to break the big, overwhelming tasks into three small parts, maybe four.)

Some days I got out a pen and worked on outlining my strategy for sustainable and authentic public platform. (So much learned in four years of experimenting and burnout. So much to be passionate about, so much to put to heartfelt use.)

Some days I read a book, some days I read to my little sister.

In April, with the winds of an early, zestful Michigan spring blowing about me and the sun on my face, I edited The Journey into something that was mostly the manuscript that 2016 Verity put out on Wattpad, a little bit leftover from the published 1st ed., and a few scraps of new flavor.

From July to October, off and on, I edited The Village in much the same fashion.

For Sorrow and Song, it took me nine months to finish books 1-2. A LOT of that work was reharmonizing book 1 (written between 5-8 years ago, over a long period of time) with the context and setup for the remaining books, while maintaining its own structural integrity. Book 2 required some reharmonization as well, but its needs were more localized and easy to target. Fewer mental gymnastics -- yet largely speaking, more difficult subject matter. With work and life getting busy again, it took twice the time to work through book 2 than it did book 1.

Which left me facing book 3, Starlight Under Clouds, in mid-August.

Back in 2020, I'd got 1/3 of the way through SuC when nightmare block and existential crisis hit. I've been pretty antsy to start tackling its facelift, but for now (August-December) my focus has been zeroed in on drafting a brand-new flashback/interlude chapter. Still, I'm having fun with it, and that's all I need.

Relocation

In March, I decided I was moving. There were a lot of factors that played into this and most of the time when people asked me why I moved, I can't even remember all of them. Am I my own motivation's keeper??? hehe

The previous summer/fall was something I'd sailed into confidently and emerged from exhausted by author-publisher controversy combined with the day-by-day intensity of tourist season at my regular job. I'd been evaluating whether I wanted to seek a more seasonally consistent job and the end of 2022 cemented that decision. I was going to get something that could coexist with consistent, sustainable writing. But I'd had enough of abrupt life changes, and in keeping with my new motto of "take it slow", I also decided firmly that I was going to give my job (my beloved, treasured first retail job with the actual best team) one more season.

At the time, I was envisioning a receptionist or librarian job, paired with moving out from home again to perhaps an apartment in the closest city. Without feeling any serious discontent with my current situation, I was also ready to get out on my own and stake down new territory.

By midwinter, ennui/my possible SAD/increasing discontent with my home church situation that I'm not going into here all combined to make me feel some serious cabin fever. I entertained welcome intrusive thoughts from taking a random drive to the Rocky mountains to hopping on an airplane for a missions trip to Africa. I was 22 and filled with thoughts and passion and energy and tired of being in one place with my life.

So when nightwraith17 reached out to ask me if I wanted to move down and rent a house with her, it took me exactly no thought to tell her that that option was 100% on the table.

Since I'd chosen to stay another year at my day job, I had a lot of time to make and then dwell on my decision. I started to question my own judgment almost as soon as I had made the call to leave, delayed telling all my local friends and church family for months, and got increasingly noncommittal about the choice as the last month wound down to a close. Some days I wanted it, some days I didn't. But after less than one week in the new place, I could say with certainty that this was the choice I needed to make.

Also, as of today's writing I now have my piano, my bed, and my books moved in and that makes my bedroom my new favorite place to be and ghgngnng I just don't have words for how much it means to be able to make your bedroom a place you want to return to, want to live in, I haven't had a space that makes me feel like this 2015.

I always love moving into and organizing new spaces, but the room I switched to from age 15 onward in my family's house was shared with two siblings and always a little chaotic. Then the bedroom in my 2021 rental was nice but tiny, and the entire house smelled like stale smoke so uh yeah that actually sucked. When I moved back in with the fam for 2022-23, I basically reclaimed my basement writing nook for my bedroom... which was okayyyy and all, but there's only so much you can do to a basement nook, and a place without natural light just doesn't feel like a place to live.

[for the record, no, the piano does not reside in my bedroom; but it is a part of my joy in the completion of this move and thus worth mention]

Work life

This was my third summer at my farm market job, the job that proved to me how much I love an excuse to be a meaningful part of someone else's day, how much I thrive on scripts and routine, and how utterly blind I am to physical items that are right in front of my nose. It was also our first summer in the brand-new building, which they needed to accommodate their expanding clientele, and a really, really hard season.

I have a lot of failings and a lot of vices, but one thing I can do is dig my heels in and commit unreservedly to helping someone else's vision succeed. I hurled myself into this new chapter of my workplace's life with gusto. Which is why it was so upsetting to realize that my heart had gone out of what I was doing only halfway through our 2023 season. The doubled pressure of expectations in hoping to retain old customers and bring in enough new traffic to sustain the costs of this investment; the disappointment from regulars who didn't like the change; the usual long summer/fall hours; being confined to the cafe department instead of my preferred front counter or fruit stand schedule, because that's where I was needed; the inevitable short-handedness combined with a sense of disconnect from my team members in the larger and more spread-out facility... two or three of those would've been manageable on their own, but all of them together sapped me dry.

The clarity, verve, and peace of the previous winter made the summer's exhaustion that much more bitter. I'd been so eager not to go back to burnout after tasting such real freedom from it, and now I was facing the worst case I'd ever had. I was jealous of my day job, jealous of the effect it might have on my writing life, a thing I'd lost control of for so long and only recently recovered, treasured it as dearly as life itself.

Strangely, I don't recall my writing being especially impacted by the daytime discontent. I was undoubtedly nourishing my body better this year than, say, 2021, or perhaps even 2022, and that had to help, but mostly I remember the day and night as separate blocks of time, even separate eras. Work didn't stop me from writing the way it did my first summer at this job, or the way the publisher drama in 2022 shut my whole creative process down. There was no way to fully ignore the mental wear of a 50-hour week, but somehow it didn't get worse when the burnout set in. The nights stayed in their own secluded headspace, dedicated to plugging away at SAS's list of fixes, and progress stayed slow but unusually linear.

I maintained piano lessons throughout the year as well, teaching three students every Tuesday and driving an hour both ways for one of them. Sometimes people expressed surprise at how much I was doing, but the lessons gave an external rhythm to my day off that helped keep it from sinking into aimless sloth. When I needed a break, I took it. I also revived my piano practice to a more focused daily stint, with the longterm target of achieving a MTNA (Music Teachers National Association) certification; and hosted my first piano recital.

After three years of working full time, I knew what I wanted from my life. The trick was getting everything scaled to a sustainable and fulfilling degree.

So that's what we're working on now.

Post-move, I applied to a variety of restaurant/retail/customer service jobs, and got a position at Chick-Fil-A in late November. Been working there a month now Wed-Sat's, and securely adjusted to the role; about to cut back to 30 hours a week to make room for my new piano teacher position at a local music school.

Said music school job should encompass between 8-10 hours a week at a very nice hourly rate, Mondays and Tuesdays exclusively, and outside that I also have 3-4 freelance students to fit in across other available timeframes. Literally none of these jobs involve a two-hour drive, which is such an impressive plus (is my bar really low? I think my bar is really low).

2023 really blew by. It's like a blink, looking back, but every individual day held so much. I've forgotten half of it by now and I'm so thankful for every hour. I'm filled with eager ambition to tackle the challenges and learning curves of 2024, ambition which I believe is something to be thankful for in itself.

I'm not quite ready to sum up the year in an elegiac line or two, because my gut has been rebelling especially fiercely the last some months against complex things being reduced to easy platitudes. But I'd love to hear what it was like for you.

Monthly breakdown

November-January: I write Winds Rise, revising and rethinking and reshaping. I want to be doing this and nothing else, and my brain obeys me because for once my priorities aren't at odds. I haven't been this in tune with my story since 2020. Time is a continuous river, marked by days and otherwise meaningless. I finish watching The Clone Wars and submerge in Star Wars music/memes. I decide that 2023 will be my last summer at the market job.

February: I finish reshaping Winds Rise and tackle Path of the Tempest. Disgruntled with a sense of stagnancy in other areas of my life, I mess around with my resume and think about moving out. I plan a visit to Melissa for March. Unexpectedly, Melissa invites me to consider moving to Alabama.

March: Visit to Alabama, in which delayed flights result in my first time spending 12+ hours in the airport system. Three stars for the unique personal experience and the girl who let me borrow her phone charger after my luggage was forwarded on a different flight. I agree to move down to AL this November. My nephew is born and I realize that this will be the hardest part of moving. Path of the Tempest revision continues, gradual but satisfying.

April: Spring hits with an UTTER CRAVING for Vitamin D on my part. I take a break from working on Path of the Tempest and finish editing The Journey instead, sitting daily on our back porch in the blessed sunshine with the laptop on my knees. At my job, we celebrate our last day open in the old building.

May: The month kicks off by packing up/dismantling the old market which is a whole vibe albeit bittersweet. I sell asparagus in a roadside canopy which is also a whole vibe. We spend the latter half of the month trying to prep the new market for opening which is 30% cool and 70% stupid stressful. Everyone agrees. At some point this month, I start working on what is called the Problem Chapter.

June: Canadian wildfire smoke hazes the skies of Michigan. New market opens and the first few weeks are like a honeymoon. Management agrees that the end-of-day closing list that I didn't think was good enough needs to be updated, and I volunteer so fast and come in to work a HALF HOUR EARLY to do it and the whole process brings me a ridiculous amount of joy. This is legitimately my most prominent memory from June. Visit Books-A-Million with a local friend. Still on the Problem Chapter.

July: Fourth of July weekend at work leads to an insanity that by and large doesn't go away for the rest of the season. I start a blog which is a horrible idea mid-busy season and yet I regret nothing. I take some more steps toward series re-publication, including purchase of ISBNs, but mostly just little things + sound bytes of research to break down the process as gradually and tolerably as I can. I visit bestie Tweeter109 late this month and hang out for a really lovely day. Begin editing The Village. Still on the Problem Chapter.

August: I realize that I dread going to work in the morning and this makes me so sad. I finish the Problem Chapter, which means finishing Path of the Tempest, and get so hyped up to start Starlight Under Clouds.

September: I visit a local attraction with the same friend mentioned in June and she buys me a going-away present. I buy a dragon mug captioned "Beware, the Dragon is Stirring" which tickles my fancy greatly. Some of the depression surrounding work eases up a bit in anticipation of the festival weeks. At the end of the month, I attend a conference in the Virginia mountains with no cell service and some quality company including unexpectedly meeting theactualbeppster for the first time. Crawl with some intrepid souls down an unmarked cave in the mountainside and sing hymns a capella in its bowels.

October: I bring my teen sister along on my weekly trips to Traverse City to beef up her driving time. Can't decide if I'm sad about leaving or desperate for a change of pace -- both are equally valid. I correspond with several prospective piano student moms down in Alabama, and finish editing The Village. I work with a venerable committee, comprised of myself, my flutist/photographer friend, and her two oldest daughters aged 12 and 10, to purchase a new piano for my home church. Descriptive prose about the fall colors pours through my head every day en route to work.

November: Squeeze in a final trip to Books-A-Million with my local bestie, with hot chai and chitchat about her and my 20-year-old sister's respective engagements. The market hosts a going-away party for me. I have no bandwidth to pack until the Monday preceding my departure. I delay my move by one day to let my brother finish fixing his truck, but ultimately we have to forget the truck anyway and just pack everything minus some large non-essential items into my lil Toyota Matrix. Detour on the way for a joyous visit with CelticWarriorQueen17. I start teaching piano to two students immediately. Spend two weeks job hunting, get a job offer from two different CFAs, and accept the closer one. Get a QuickBooks account for author financing. Start sourcing cover designers for series re-publication.

December: Extended a job offer at a local music school after a rigorous hiring process, psyched to start it. My family mails me a Christmas care package and my dad + brother drive down the week after Christmas just to bring me my piano. I spend Christmas Eve dinner with a couple from the church I'm visiting, the festivities of the day following with Melissa & family. I realize that I'm ready to think about re-publishing in terms of timeframe, and draft a seven-month outline for a July '24 publication of The Journey.

And that's about where things sit. I've spent so much of my adult life feeling like my priorities, my commitments, and my desires were beyond manageable, and struggling to make them so. Last November and choosing to bring my books' rights back to my exclusive ownership gave me a legitimate sabbatical, a gap in the grind, a chance to reframe overcommitment into targeted dedication. And I may always be an over-committer, but I think the perspective of the five years between ages 18 and 23 is here to stay.

When the lady who'd known me for all of four weeks pegged me as "driven" over that Christmas Eve dinner, I was startled. I find myself so often conscious of all the things I wish I could do, but don't have time for (blog regularly; start a memoir; write a practical theology; knit more often; run; self-defense classes; and so forth...) that I don't consider the value of my internal motivation for all it's done so far. "I guess I am," I admitted in reply. It was a comforting moment, a reminder not to expect the superhuman of myself, and a refreshing thought: I am driven. I'm happy surrounding myself with goals, academia, and commitments in a way not everybody is, and I can be that person without pushing myself into workaholism, without succumbing to burnout, because I've been there -- and I know some better now.

Sustainability for the years ahead, by God's grace, inside and out.

But there's always gonna be a goal-oriented, checklist-obsessed ten-year-old inside of me and I am so okay with that.