Happy 2021!

Sorry I missed my Christmas well-wishing for 2020; been busy with work to the point where the last two weeks I’ve kind of been dealing with a fuzzy brain. I decided to stop picking up even on call in the evenings, and I’m feeling much better already.

So I looked back on goals – I think goals are better than resolutions, mostly on account that I know when I’ve reached a goal, whereas a resolution for me at least seems a bit more theoretical – like you never really know how your progress is if you ‘go the gym three times a week’ but you goof around on your phone and never break out of the comfort zone.

According to WP a year ago, my goals were fitness and financial. I’ll be really honest: Finances seem fine but that also took a backburner because 1) I can’t really go anywhere 2) A lot of the stores were limited hours this year. I’m getting there; if my goal was to be completely debt free before buying a house I wouldn’t have moved in 2019.

Fitness: Well, my exercise bike is still broken. I’m not as lean or ripped as I’d like to be, but to be fair I haven’t really been focusing on diet. I traded and worked in a different station and I got to see everyone’s home gyms; honestly I have been following different stuff on youtube. You can get plenty of decent routines for all fitness levels on youtube, so long as you have a mat and maybe a few dumbbells, not saying I don’t miss the gym but I just learned to make due. I think I’ll make a more tangible goal: I want to do 1 pull up. I want to do more, but let’s start with 1 pull up. My nephew can do like four or five, so I want to be able to do a pull up.

Seriously though, social distancing aside, I got to do some amazing kayaks in Manitoba. I looked back at my travel pics from Hawaii and Costa Rica (two and four years ago respectively this month) and while I admit I miss traveling, I also think that I can be patient and responsible and wait.

Writing and Book Wise: Well, I finished both Rogue Healer 3 and Chimera, the latter was me trying to figure out how to get myself out of a hole I dug. Both need work and a good chunk of Titan’s Ascent (Tentative Title for RH3) will be removed and put in another book after a brief conversation with the publisher on word count. I don’t mind, I just have to stop reading 200k bricks and thinking I can do the same thing.

Dreams of Mariposa came out this spring. I think I fell off the promo and review bandwagon, so I need to get on that. Witchslayer’s Scion (Rogue Healer 1) will hopefully be out this March. I owe the publisher a better map. I’d love to say my art and inking skills have drastically improved, but I think I’m about the same, but I kind of know what I’m doing and have had plenty of practice. I had to resubmit Magus’ Gambit in the fall, but I have enough other projects to keep me busy.

As said, I figured out the Ebook thing but I’m not confident on my understanding of code. I would love to say that it’s easy enough to hire someone, but I’m a once bitten twice shy kind of person, and let’s say finding an editor for another project has been challenging, so I’m second guessing myself at this point. I know a big part of this has been the stress from all things COVID related – I feel confident enough when it comes to handling sick patients, but everyone seems edgy and it’s effecting my mental health.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to waste anyone’s time and I always want to put out a good product, and it’s my job to make it as good as I can, but I have to get over the self-imposed perfectionism. I’m not saying my works are perfect – I’m saying I get hung up on people talking about minor issues like they’re major ones. It’s basically Imposter Syndrome. I’ll get there, it just takes time and me finding the right people to hire for what I need.

I wish you all the best in 2021, and I also wanted to say how proud I am of many of you civilians who stepped up. With minimal training, a lot of people did a lot of hard stuff in 2020. I don’t know what it’s like in your neck of the woods, but I can’t wait for to see some of the usual suspects again when it comes to shows and conventions.