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Most of December was an exhausting mess that pretty much burned all forward progress on my creative practice, but it culminated in a very pleasant Christmas with family and friends, and ultimately, that’s what we really want from the holidays, isn’t it?
I recently saw a video that suggested you take some time at the end of the year to go back through the camera roll on your phone, starting from January 1, and write down every good memory that comes up. The point is that we tend to forget the good things and over-focus on the bad, but we tend to only take photos of the good things, so our photos are a great reminder of the events we’re most likely to have forgotten and are most likely to need to remember as we close out the year.
My wife and I, and everyone we know, have spent a lot of time this year commiserating about how awful 2024 has been. Going through my photos for the year reminded me of so many good things that happened, and it also put the bad things in their proper perspective: they were events that only lasted for a moment, but because I continue to carry the grief, pain, and trauma with me day after day, I’ve had the psychological illusion that every bad event is somehow still ongoing.
This realization doesn’t dispel the grief, pain, or trauma, but it does right-size those feelings in relation to my joys, some of which included:
And then there are my accomplishments this year:
That’s not half bad for such an “awful” year.
I’m still struggling to secure more than a few uninterrupted minutes for my creative practice at a time, with any real consistency. My work is almost entirely opportunistic right now: I’m constantly on the lookout for moments where everyone else’s needs are met and where no one and nothing is actively demanding my attention, and I’m constantly adjusting and tweaking my creative process and toolset so I can dive into it instantly and anywhere as soon as I recognize one of those moments.
There are several problems with this approach, not the least of which is that it relegates my creative practice to being the last priority, after everyone else is satisfied, after every other chore is done, after every other need is met. This builds resentment over time, no matter how hard I try not to let it; eventually, it becomes impossible not to start blaming other people and their needs for my apparent inability to do the work.
It wasn’t until I started working through The Artist’s Way that I finally found a resonant perspective for understanding this dynamic: the twin ideas of the inner artist as a separate being from the self, and of the inner artist as a child whose care is entrusted to the self.
Imagining my inner artist child makes it painfully clear how and why giving my creative practice last priority makes me feel the way it does: it’s the same as giving your child last priority, where everyone and everything else comes before their needs. In that scenario, your child feels not only resentful, but helpless, abandoned, unwanted, a burden. And how do you feel as a parent? Guilty, lazy, selfish, undeserving.
The challenge, of course, is that I also have a literal child to take care of, plus a wife and two part-time step-kids, and a household to run and all the labor that comes with that. Simply having a meaningful realization about my inner artist child isn’t enough to solve the problem; it’s just the trailhead on the path to action. But what’s clear is that I must find healthy ways to prioritize my creative practice in 2025, to stop looking for slivers of time where I can sneak it in and instead start claiming blocks of time where, just like a full-time job, the creative practice is the scheduled activity, not to be delayed, deferred, or disturbed.
And that means letting go of all the people-pleasing behaviors that were seeded in my childhood, learning to accept that my dedication to my creative practice won’t necessarily be convenient for those around me, and internalizing the fact that others’ convenience is not actually the goal.
2024 brought us the re-election of Trump, and 2025 brings his re-inauguration to the Presidency, along with a wave of newly-elected Republican legislators, kicking off at least two years of total right-wing control of all three branches of government.
We’ve all been lamenting how awful 2024 was. I hate to say it, but 2025 isn’t likely to improve. If anything, it’s going to get worse, and the worst is going to be done to us by the people who are about to have all that power.
On top of that, we’ve got runaway climate change continuing to do its thing, endemic covid still circulating in a population that’s stuck in collective denial, a new bird flu looming on the horizon, generative AI wasting massive amounts of resources to steal art from artists and convert it to money for tech bros, social media being overrun by disinformation campaigns and AI-generated slop, and the entirety of our online lives being enshittified at turbo speed by a hostile tech industry bent on monetizing our every thought regardless of the damage it does to our social fabric.
It’s not going to get better. Realizing that, we need to figure out how to keep living meaningful lives within the circumstances we actually have.
Today, I think the answers lie in authenticity and community.
First, we need to be very honest with ourselves about who we are (and who we are not), what we need, and what we desire. Then we need to learn to live in community with others, showing up as our authentic selves, clearly stating our needs and desires, genuinely hearing others’ needs and desires, and working together to pursue both our collective and individual goals in good faith and with understanding and empathy. And finally, we need to trust that we’ll all have each other’s backs when the shit hits the fan, whether that shit is political unrest, a natural disaster due to climate instability, another pandemic, an economic crash, a fascist uprising, or whatever else the future has in store for us under the unfettered rule of the greedy, narcissistic sociopaths we’ve inexplicably handed power to.
These circumstances absolutely suck, but they’re so far above our heads that we can’t meaningfully alter them as individuals, which means the only way out is through, and the only way through is together.
As I mentioned in my previous sabbatical update, our savings ran out much faster than anticipated due to a bunch of emergencies and critical support needs during 2024, and that greatly reduced our financial runway.
Fortunately, some of the money we lent has recently come back to us, which gets us out of the immediate hot water and gives us a little bit more of a buffer into next year. Still, my wife and I have both started looking for new employment; unfortunately, we’re doing so in the worst tech job market of our careers, so our current expectations are low.
I’ve started thinking seriously about how to turn my creative practice into an income generating business, which feels premature from the creative side, but necessary from the practical side if this thing is going to survive in anything like the form I envision. Making that happen is going to require, at minimum, greatly increasing my pace and output of written work, and that in turn is going to require establishing and keeping some much more concrete routines for supporting a consistent creative practice in the new year.
I’m still putting out applications for jobs – mostly in the game dev and tech sectors right now, since that’s where my resume is oriented (see here for details) – but what I’d ideally like to find are highly flexible, less than full time opportunities that help mitigate financial pressure while still leaving plenty of time and energy for my creative practice to thrive. (So, yes, a unicorn.)
If you have leads, I’d love to hear about them! Shoot me an email or DM me on Mastodon.
I’m not usually one for New Year’s resolutions, but there is an extent to which setting intentions can be useful, and that’s when the intentions are actions that are entirely within your own control. (We can’t control our outcomes, so setting goals like “make X amount of money” or “lose X amount of weight” are often doomed to fail, but goals like “attend a networking event every month” or “go to the gym three times a week” can sometimes yield outsized success.)
I’m not sure yet which of these I’m definitely committed to for 2025 and which are nice-to-haves, but here are some potential goals on my mind right now, roughly ordered from most likely to least likely to actually happen:
Finish The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron – I started this book around the beginning of December, and I can see why it’s a classic: it addresses the dilemma of art in a way that feels more resonant and true than anything else I’ve ever read. I’m currently four weeks into its 12-week “creative recovery”, so I’ve still got two months of tough internal work ahead of me, but so far, every minute has felt profoundly worth it.
Establish healthy daily routines for a consistent creative practice – I’m still trying to figure out what this looks like and how to do it, and The Artist’s Way is helping with that, but the cold fact is: if I can’t solve this one, nothing further down this list is going to happen at all.
Put several titles into publication – This doesn’t necessarily mean “get published”, which is an outcome I don’t control; this means “submit for publication” in the trad-publishing world, or alternatively, “self publish” if I decide to go the indie route. The actionable goal is to bring a few pieces up to a publishable standard and take the business steps necessary to at least begin the process of bringing them to market. There is some flexibility in the actual number, but I think it has to be more than one, and I think it’s probably (ideally?) a handful of short fiction pieces and a novel or novella.
Start an author newsletter and/or Patreon – I have some ideas and I’ve done some research into approaches to monetizing my writing outside of books and magazines. I feel like this is going to be a necessary pillar of building the financial flexibility required to sustain my creative practice throughout the year and beyond. (It’s worth noting here that there are a lot of gross monetization strategies out there, and I’m aiming to steer well clear of those; I really don’t want to become one of those pyramid-scheme get-rich-quick business-bro writers that plague Medium and Substack.)
Read at least 24 books, mostly fiction – I achieved this in 2024 despite it not being an explicit goal, and it made clear how much I’ve missed reading in my adult life. The only thing I’d change in 2025 is that I’d increase the proportion of fiction to non-fiction, because I feel like I read too many light pop-psychology books this year and didn’t get a lot out of most of them.
Do a close reading of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin – This is my favorite book. It’s been a few years since I read it, and I’ve never read it critically, so I’m considering doing that this year and blogging about the experience as I go.
Try some serialized fiction – I don’t have a specific concept for this yet, but if I’m starting up a newsletter this year, I think using it as a vehicle for some serialized fiction might be a neat experiment, and it would help acclimate me to a regular cadence of deadlines.
Try some genre studies – For as long as I’ve wanted to write stories, going all the way back to my childhood, I’ve wanted to work in the speculative fiction realm: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and magical realism. But I’ve never really tried writing in other genres: romance, humor, mystery, thriller, historical fiction, adventure, noir, etc. So I’ve had the notion to try a monthly genre exercise where I write a single scene or a flash fiction piece in a different genre – outside of F/SF/H – every month. (This one may be a real stretch; I start to worry that I’m trying to do too much.)
I do notice there’s a heavy slate of writing goals here, and no music goals. Am I relegating the music to just a fun, occasional hobby? And is that, maybe… okay?
No matter how these goals go, I expect 2025 to be a weird year. I’m entering it without regular employment, in a severely depressed tech job market, and with a limited financial runway. I’m orienting most of my effort to building a consistent creative practice in the arts, a famously unpredictable industry. I’m putting an enormous amount of trust in the synchronicity of the universe (readers of The Artist’s Way will understand the reference), and an enormous amount of energy into the community my wife and I have built around us.
I have no idea what’s going to happen, so I’m preparing for the worst while aiming for the best, and trying to take all of it one day at a time.