Habit Tracking: Week 52 (December 26 - December 31)

Final habit tracker of the year!


Some rainbow stars - kinda like fireworks, ish.

In order to end on the new year, I only have six days tracked this week, and I'll start fresh on Jan 01.

This was a rough week. I recognize that I was "lucky", in that the things that were hard for me were far worse for people who were directly impacted. There was the horrible shooting spree on Monday, which hit multiple sites that I was extremely familiar with, and involved five people being murdered, including a friend of a friend. Then the fires yesterday, which destroyed anywhere between 500-1000+ homes in a suburban area not far from me at all. I have coworkers still trying to find out if they have houses to return to. It was hard to want to do much of anything else under the onslaught of tragedy.

Goals for the week:
- I wrote 500 words on Connections of the Heart (somehow)
- With this post, I am finishing sharing the year's habit trackers!
- Shortly after this, I will make my year-end post
- I did read more Dark Rise (oh shit, it's getting good!)
- I did tentatively write out some goals and thoughts for 2022, but I'll share 'em tomorrow
- We did not make truffles, since Alex's stomach has been angry about the baked goods at Xmas, so maybe birthday truffles.
- I got crickets for Broccoli Cheddar Bomb

For my tracked habits:
- Work - 3.5/6 (slightly more than half a day today)
- Household Maintenance - 5/6
- Physical Activity - 1/6
- Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 1/6, plus two days of less than 500
- Meta Work - 4/6
- Personal Writing - 6/6
- Other Creative Things - 1/6
- Reading - 4/6, mostly Dark Rise
- Video Games - 0/6
- Social Interaction - 6/6

Total words of fiction written: 642 words on Connections of the Heart

Total words of fiction written between November 28 and December 31: 9231

Total words of fiction written between January 03 and December 31: 213939

2021 Retrospective:

Looking back at the start of 2021, I realize that I didn’t actually set any firm “resolutions.” I had a few semi-tentative goals, but mostly avoided being too specific.
I wanted to try habit-tracking again, which I did! Successfully! For the whole year!
I wanted to actually talk to/interact with/stay in touch with people, which I’ve also done, largely here on Dreamwidth.

But for the more concrete resolutions, such as they were, the goals I did have were mainly “write more”, “read more”, and “move around more.”

One out of three ain’t bad?

But honestly, I’m very proud of the amount I got written for 2021. It’s absolutely the most I’ve ever written in a year: 213,939 words! Over the course of the year, I’d avoided figuring out any sort of year-to-date total, though I added up the wordcounts for each month individually. So adding the monthly counts up and looking at that total was an absolute shock!

Unfortunately, it didn’t translate to very many works that were completed/shared. Instead, I have several WIPs, in varying stages of completion, either partially posted or entirely on my computer.

Only one completed fic: Step Right Up

Plus two in-progress fics: Connections of the Heart and Island Territory.

The bulk of the wordcount went to an unposted fic titled "All Strange Wonders" (which I am excited to post, but want to wait until I’ve finished my other WIPs), and to "Lunacy", the original story I worked on for NaNoWriMo. Plus a couple other bits and pieces of stories, or versions from one of the above that wound up scrapped.

I didn’t read as much as I’d hoped to, though as I go back and look, it was a little better than I thought.
In 2021, I read about 10 and a half books: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, River of Teeth, Taste of Marrow, The House in the Cerulean Sea, Angel of the Overpass, Fugitive Telemetry, Imaginary Numbers, Calculated Risks, The Last Sun, Under the Whispering Door, and I'm about 2/3 of the way through Dark Rise. Two of those are novellas, but that's a little less than a book each month. On the upside, I really enjoyed all of them! (This also doesn't include other short stories and novellas, or any fic.)
[ETA: Actually, this doesn't quite do it justice, because I also read That Ain't Witchcraft, Imaginary Numbers, Calculated Risks, and have started Angel of the Overpass with Taylor, which adds four to my total (even if they're re-reads for me.) Alex and I are also about halfway through The Only Good Indians, and just need more long car rides to keep reading during, lol.
So that's actually more like 15 books for the year.]

My last real goal had been to find some sort of physical activity I enjoyed (aside from going out to clubs and dancing, since that’s a terrible idea during a pandemic.) While we did do a decent amount of walking and hiking, I didn’t really find anything else I enjoyed… but I also didn’t really try very hard. The exercise room in our apartment was closed for Covid, and only reopened for about a month before closing again. I can’t afford a gym membership or something, nor do I think I’d use one if I had it. So… my quest on that front continues.

But things I am happy with this year:

The writing. While some weeks (and months) were far more successful than others, and my productivity and motivation both ebbed and flowed, I always got SOMETHING written each month. It wasn’t quite the 500 words every day that I’d aimed for, but I still wrote a lot!

Habit tracking! I kept up with it for the whole year, and definitely intend to continue. I appreciate that it helps me to look a whole picture, rather than just how I feel on the current day. It’s nice to look back and see that a downswing or rough patch doesn’t mean I *never* did anything worthwhile. And it's given me something to look back at, to look at my writing totals, and what books I read, and things like that. It's kind of nice to hold a record (even a very narrow, abbreviated one) of my whole year in my hands.

Dreamwidth!
Livejournal mattered deeply to me as a teen and 20-something. (It’s where I met Alex, and we’ve been together for going on 12 years, now.) But as life got weird and complicated (and also really bad for a while), I stopped doing any sort of journaling. After that, I often WANTED to return to it, and just kind of struggled to actually do it.
I’m ALSO one of the people who deeply misses the more community-focused fandom that could be found on LJ. As tumblr goes through continuing cycles of disaster and misery and content restriction, plus all the general reactivity/polarization/dogpiling/prioritization of hot takes/etc. of most social media, I miss it even more. (And no, it was never perfect, yes there were always fights, but god, it was better than fucking twitter.)
While I doubt Dreamwidth is going to hit the critical mass required to truly become the new home of fandom on the internet (even if I wish it would) it IS at least home to a pretty solid group of people with similar, like-minded interest in the types of interaction I miss.

This year, I managed to post every. damn. day. That wasn’t a hard goal at the start, but the longer I went without breaking my streak, the more stubbornly I held to it.

Along with that, I for the most part didn’t procrastinate on posting about the things I wanted to share. It used to be the norm that I’d do a fun thing, have pictures from it, and then never ever share them. This year I was pretty good about doing so, and that makes me happy. This seems like a silly thing to be AS proud of as I am, but "just DO THE THING" has been a struggle for literally decades at this point, lol.

My relationship with Alex is good. I'm glad we have each other. I'm also still deeply grateful that we have a roof over our heads.

Cy, like all dogs, remains the best dog.

The year itself doesn't feel like a total win: We are STILL in the middle of a global pandemic, which at this point seems poised to continue forever. Alex has a looming health mystery. My job is often more frustrating than it is satisfying, and I wish it felt like the same company it was when I started.

But overall, personally, the good has mostly outweighed the bad. As always, I hope for better things in the next year, and hope to carry through the things I've learned and to improve upon them.

I know that the change between December 31 of one year and January 01 of the next is a completely arbitrary division, but I'll still take advantage of the cultural reset button. Cheers to everyone, and may 2022 bring us all the best. (Or at least less bad!)