Reflecting on 2024

2025 already?

Where has the time gone?!

With a new year beginning, it’s only natural to reflect on the previous one. Where was I this time last year? How did my year end up? What goals, plans, hopes, and dreams am I carrying into the new year?

Ya know, the whole ‘new year, new you’ type of content…

BUT…

we’re not doing that here today.

Nope.

Believe me when I say I think it’s important to have goals and plans, but you see, more often than not, at the start of a new year, people think hard resets are in order or go full throttle, making life habit changes and setting big plans, only to end up failing in less than a month.

Why?

Big changes don’t happen overnight.

Plain and simple.

SO… then what exactly is this post for? You might be asking yourself…

Reflection only. (It's in the title of the post, silly.)

All silliness aside, I don’t want to ring in the 2025 year with lots of new habits and goals and big changes. Instead, I want to focus on continuing to shift myself in the direction I was already headed… continue to build slowly upon previous habits I have been implementing already and continue growing. Plain and simple. No big ‘author goals for 2025’ or any such nonsense.

I am nothing if not a creature of simplicity. XD

Reflecting on 2024 looks slightly off for me. For starters, I had a TON of health stuff I had to deal with, and it took a major toll on me. That’s not to say that I didn’t clearly survive, albeit with possibly some more dark humor added to my repertoire of unhealthy coping mechanisms, but hey, I survived. But it is to say, however, that things didn’t quite go as planned.

I’m only going to go over the topic of writing things here, or else we would be here all day, so let’s get that party started, shall we?

I wrote…

a lot.

Like a lot, a lot.

A lot of it, to my own surprise. Yet when I look back at WHEN I wrote, some things stick out.

For a slight bit of backstory — I began writing book 1, Whisper of Secrets, in Oct 2023. I wrote like a wild woman as I reignited my passion for the written word, and it caught fire deep in my soul. I wrote day and night and hyper-focused on my story as only an ADHD'er can; then the Christmas season hit, and I decided to look up from my laptop screen and spend time with my family.

No problem with that, right?

As stated, the ADHD is strong with this one, and the problem arose come January 2024 when… guess what… I didn’t get immediately back to it. Shocker. I know.

It was like that dopamine well had run dry for a spell, and despite it having nothing to do with writer’s block… believe me, the story was there. It was gnawing at my subconscious in literally every single way to be written. It was more that the habit had died.

I let it slide for a few months until the gnawing was literally eating me alive (well maybe not literally but come on, we all know I’m a it dramatic.) Then on the day I said to myself, “Self. Get your shit together and write the damn story!” I did just that.

I put pen to paper as they say — although I typed it because omg who has the time to handwrite their novel, nothing wrong with that but my arthritis could never — and got crack-a-lackin’. (Excuse me for a moment while I leap about in a dance of joy at using that word here in this blog post solely for the purpose of annoying someone dear to me who hates it when I say crack-a-lackin'.)

Then after another bout of hyperfocus, my book was done. Well, not done done because then I had the realization you’d think I would have known going in, but alas, I was not prepared to realize that after you write the damn book… brace yourselves because this is going to get scary for a second… you have to ‘edit’ it and ‘revise’ it.

Le gasp!

I know. The horror… cue dramatic chaise lounge, back of the hand to the forehead, collapse here.

Oh, the plot, she thickens.

I am much more a writer who prefers drafting, I have found. It’s much easier to write the words on the page than it is to think hard about them and dissect whether they actually make sense or work or what have you. But somehow I managed to hyperfocus through the revision and editing phase mostly unscathed… mostly. (I did develop a deep love for a good em dash and well-placed ellipses — and you can pry them from my cold dead millennial hands because they aren’t going anywhere.)

It was easy to get carried away in the complexities and nuances of craft at that time.

This is where the reflection comes in; I promise.

I learned a lot about not only the craft but also myself during this time. Some hard things, some fun things, some fun and hard things… I gobbled it all up and hid in the process. But you know what else was happening while I worked on revision after revision…

I fell out of the habit of actually writing… again.

Bad little author… bad.

So when I realized I had wasted a lot of time not writing (again), I looked at my journey that far and reflected. (See, I got to the reflecting)

It took me almost 1 year on the dot to write book 1. But when I stepped back and looked… in actual active writing time, as in actual days spent adding words and furthering the story… it only took me 3 months. Around 90 days of writing time.

So what did I do with this information and knowledge?

I wallowed in self-pity for a moment while I reflected (again, ha!) on how much time I had wasted, and after that, vowed I would never let that happen again.

Then what did I do, you might be asking?

Went the opposite direction, as only an ADHD'er can, and decided I was going to do my own version of something akin to Nanowrimo. Complete an entire 100k word book in 31 days.

I spent 2 weeks in October hyper-fixating on planning this novel because I pantsed most of WoSecrets and it bit me in the ass near the end, so I thought I was going to plot, plot, plot 'til my heart stops.

But you wanna know what happened? It’s a real doozy.

When it came time to start drafting… I was so out of practice I about had a panic attack on day 1 and gave up on the whole thing.

Who would have thought? Literally everyone but me. >.>

So to come back full circle to the beginning of this heinous post… my 2025 is now just an adaptation of my 2024 and a continuation of the shifts in my process.

The main one being… JUST FREAKING WRITE!

The realization also hit me that as I approach 40 (shudder), I have way too many story ideas than I could possibly have time left to write them, so why not just write as many as I can? But in order to do that, I need to be doing what?

You guessed it… drafting!

Hyperfocus can be a superpower, but it can also be a downfall. So late in the year, I shifted my process to a mixture of both, and now I am soooo much happier and more productive on all fronts.

Authors have a ton of background work that must be done to even begin to publish, but at the heart of it comes writing first and foremost. I lost that habit for a while (ok, more than once), but when it hit, it hit. Just freaking write.

So all of this to say, in 2025 I will just be continuing to write… while I revise and edit… while I work on all the other billion things being an author comes with… while I take time to set down my hyperfocus and enjoy other creative outlets… while everything in life is exploding into chaos and I want to hole up in a cabin in the woods and never come back out… while my feral raccoon energy is on full display… I WILL WRITE.

Happy 2025! Hope this year is happy and healthy for you all.

<3

Rhea