It’s a new year, which means a brief post looking both forwards and backwards, Janus-like, for it is indeed his month.
2015 succeeded in the admittedly low-difficulty task in being better than 2014, which was terrible, and the last three/four months of it in particular have been pretty good – new job, new city, new creative focus, and I’m on my way towards earning another shiny new degree. Sure, I may be broker than broke, and my Christmas vacation was sadly truncated due to that, but the four days of festivity was filled with films, family, and a fantastic Christmas Eve pub trip with Jack and Alex H. There were many disappointments and frustrations throughout the year, but that’s life, isn’t it?
I do think I’m in as good a position as I can be right now, in order to make 2016 a year in which I finally achieve some of the things I’ve always wanted to. I’m going to keep my specific goals under my hat until the end of the year, when I’ll pull back the curtain and we’ll see how I did. Summarily though, I’ve done a lot of talking on this blog about various creative endeavours, and 2016’s going to be about doing the walking.
So, we’re in January. My immediate plans are to get as many shifts as I can, and get another income stream somehow, in order to plug the money hole. I’ve got my first MA deadline on the 19th, which is to submit six revised and one new poem, so I’ll be working hard on that. Around this, I’m going to get my arse into gear and put myself up for many more open mic nights and gigs and suchlike.
Also, I’m going to put my play Just a Kiss into its final writing draft, which it’s close to being, and start look at ways of getting it out there. It’s an idea I had way back in March 2012, and I’m not sure it has benefited from four years of development – mostly, it was four years of avoiding it, the traditional new-writer thing of not wanting to finish something because it’ll never be the fantastic thing in your head. Now, after all this stringing-along, it feels like I owe the piece its day in the sun, in some form or other. It’s no longer exactly my play, but a collaboration between different versions of me, if that makes sense, and I owe it to the other guy to let him finally have his say.
Finally, I got an email from WordPress saying I managed exactly ten posts last year. This time round, going to push for twelve. One down, eleven to go!
More soon.
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