In 2020, I hung a calendar bought as a joke (shirtless men in kilts) on the wall, and started marking off days I wrote with a gold star. Six years later, I still have a calendar on the wall that makes me laugh (twelve months of divers flipping off fish, this time), and I am putting pink sparkle stars on it for the days I write this story (with a couple days of red sparkle stars for stopping to write something completely unrelated.)

Why pink? Because I thought this was going to be a silly little ramble that would taper out after about 8K words, so I picked a colour that I hadn’t used yet on the multicoloured sparkle star sheets. 44K words later, I am eyeing my sparkle star sheets, and contemplating if this story is going to run long enough that I’m going to need to buy another pack… twice when I knew it was going to be a full novel, I bought a roll of stickers instead, but the sparkle sheets don’t make me feel like I’m wasting a roll on a small ramble.

Each day looms large in our mental view, while the weeks compress, and months past seem to have flown. Being able to look back at past years, I’m able to see that first, I wrote a lot more often than it feels like I did. (Feelings lie.) Second, it’s pretty clear that every surgery my darling man had sits in a dry spell of writing – that I could force day or two scattered here and there, but until the stress level that started with pre-surgery and stretched to recovery dropped, the words didn’t come.

But the other thing I note is the power of persistence. Of momentum. We are creatures of habit – even if we don’t mean to be. I have friends who habitually worry. Just like some people jiggle their leg and tap their fingers when they’re not paying attention to controlling their output, so others have brains that find or make up reasons to worry. It doesn’t matter how well their life is going, they’ll find the stupidest, most made-up stuff to be anxious about, because that’s the familiar rut of their thoughts. Similarly, creating art is a habit – if I sit down every day and do it, it becomes easier and easier to mentally do, until ideating people and places that never existed and writing them down becomes a familiar pattern in my thoughts.

My writing is not evenly spaced out along the years like a M-F 9-5 job; it clumps, and it clumps hard. When I’m not sick or stressed to the point of impacting my health, if I’m not writing, I don’t write. Months can go by with 3-5 stars on the page. If I am writing, putting in effort day in and day out, it’ll be 5-6 days a week, every week, until a couple months later the story is done (or life derails me hard again.)

So, this year, I’m not setting out to do New Year’s Resolutions in any grand fashion for my writing. I have a few hopefully achievable goals (Finish 2 stories, publish 2 stories), but instead, I’m just going to focus on persistence. On showing up and trying to read back into the story, and possibly edit the chapter a little clearer and smoother, and maybe, having read back in, get some of the next chapter’s needs, goals, and conversations roughed out, and possibly written. To just make showing up and working on it a habit, so the words flowing will be the familiar mental rut.

I’ve managed 10 years of weightlifting not by having a grand plan, or much of a goal beyond “get off the cane / stay off the cane”, but by simply showing up at the gym 2-3 times a week, every week, at the same time, and lifting the weights my coach writes down in the training log. Here’s to doing much the same on the storytelling side!