If I’m being completely honest, this year hasn’t gone quite the way I imagined it would.
At the beginning of the year, I had a plan. I had goals, self-imposed deadlines, and a pretty clear idea of where I wanted to be with my writing by now. Needless to say, not all of those deadlines have been met.
This has been a difficult year in my personal life, and there have been moments when writing simply had to take a back seat. Some days, finding the energy to write was harder than I wanted to admit. I’ve had to learn to give myself a little more grace and accept that sometimes life gets in the way of the plans we make for ourselves.
But it’s only September.
There are still a few months left in this year, and I’m not ready to write it off just yet.
I’m still here. And I’m still writing.
If anything, one of the things that has kept me going is the fact that I never seem to run out of stories.
In fact, that might be part of my problem.
I’ll be working on one manuscript, completely determined to stay focused, when a new idea appears. A character says something I wasn’t expecting. A scene comes to me out of nowhere. Suddenly I’m thinking about a completely different story, wondering where it could go and mentally writing chapters before I’ve even finished the one I’m supposed to be working on.
It’s both one of my favourite things about being a writer and one of my biggest distractions.
There are now four manuscript folders sitting on my desktop, all at different stages. Some are being written, some are being rewritten, and some are patiently waiting for their turn. I’m trying to remind myself that I don’t have to write every story the moment it arrives. Some ideas can wait.
So, while I may not have reached every goal I set for myself this year, I’m choosing to look at what I have done instead.
I kept writing.
I kept coming back to my stories, even after difficult days. I kept making notes, developing characters, working through scenes, and imagining where these books could eventually take me.
The deadlines may have changed, but the dream hasn’t.
And with a few months still left in the year, I’m going to keep pushing forward. Maybe I won’t reach every goal I originally set for myself, but there is still plenty of time to make progress.
One page. One scene. One chapter at a time.
I’m learning that progress doesn’t always look like ticking every box on a list. Sometimes progress is simply refusing to give up on something you love.
And I’m not giving up on these stories.
