At least once a week, I open WordPress. I look at my feed, see if there are any new posts I’m interested in. I have an itch to write one myself. After ten, twenty, thirty minutes, I close the tab and move on with my day.
I stopped writing for my blog around this time last year. I had quit my job in a whirlwind of emotion, thinking I would finally be free to work on my art. Instead, I completely fell apart. I had a breakdown, which led to a breakthrough. The first two weeks I was sick, then I cried and felt sorry for myself for a couple weeks, then I decided I had made a big mistake and started looking for another job. If I couldn’t force myself to work from home, then I had to have an employer. I still knew that ultimately, I wanted to be self-employed, but I had proven to myself that I wasn’t ready yet.
I spent about three months unemployed before getting another job – one of the worst, if not THE worst, I’ve ever had. That dumpster fire of a workplace was exactly what I needed to reignite my will to move forward. I was so miserable, I had to admit it to my supervisor. I was in a one-on-one meeting with her, trying to set goals. Before coming to the meeting I had just hung up on yet another belligerent client, and I was at my wits end. My only goal was to get out of that job without being unemployed again. My supervisor was extremely understanding, as she hated her own job for many of the same reasons I did.
I was at that job for about four months before I got my old job back. The job I had quit last year. Although I still dislike many aspects of this job, all I have to do is think of that four months of endless stress to be extremely grateful. I also got my old job back at exactly the right time. We started working from home full-time two weeks in. The horrible job was impossible to do from home, and required constant interaction with the public.
I have continued working on fiction this past year, slowly but steadily. I finished the first season of my space opera/future fiction, Tenacity Prime. My novel is almost done, really. It will absolutely be published before 2020 is over—October at the latest. I like the idea of a Halloween release for a thriller. Once it’s done, I’ll have lots of self-publishing and book stuff to write about, which I’m looking forward to.
I’ve stayed away from blog posts because I hate putting out content when I have nothing interesting to say. That’s why I stopped my weekly posts about writing, I felt like they were empty and unnecessary. But I’ve realized that I really enjoy other author/bloggers posts about their lives and how they’re feeling. I didn’t have much to say about my life the past year, because I was in the middle of constant upheaval. My head is much more clear now, and I’m able to reflect and plan for the future.
K. J. Cole 