And now, everything ends...and perhaps, begins as well.

This past year has been an interesting one, personally. In a way it seems the Mayans got it right--it seems a lot of things going on in my life are finishing a cycle. I've done a lot of purging of things that have had a negative effect on me over the past few years--bad habits, stress triggers, toxic things. Stepping away from politics online. Changing mindsets. Realizing I just didn't care about certain things anymore. Not a willful ignorance or giving up, but a realization that I didn't need to have this stuff constantly on the front burners of my brain. Life will indeed proceed as normal if I let them go.

And with such endings come new beginnings. I realized over the course of the last few years, especially where creativity is concerned, that what I needed to do was start over from the beginning. This showed up quite often with my revision of A Division of Souls. I found that instead of trying to rework scenes I already had, I had to back up even further, and treat this revision as if I was completely rewriting the novel over, much like I did when I wrote it the first time. In doing this, I was able to pay full attention to how I was telling the story, as well as being able to see what I was doing wrong. I was also able to reach that level where I got the story, where it clicked in my head and I knew what I needed to do with it.

I started using this "start over from the beginning" mantra elsewhere, not just in my writing but with life in general, and I started reconnecting with more positive things--good habits, knowing when to let things go, creating things I enjoy creating, being more thoughtful about my ideas and actions. [Of course, emmalyon hasn't seen the full extent of this due to my penchant for joking; I enjoy coming up with increasingly ridiculous excuses for not going to the gym or eating badly!] Mantras ended up being a good idea for me, actually. One of my worst habits is that my brain gets stuck in overdrive when I'm just about to fall asleep, and in the process I get all twitchy and restless, which frustrates Emm to no end. Some months back when I caught myself doing this, I'd just repeat "Okay, just stop. Just STOP it." in my head, and after awhile, it started working. The stress would vanish and my runaway brain would come back down to earth. I still twitch and move around, but I'm not as bad as I was.

Part of this "start over" was brought on by trying to rechannel what it was that got me into 80s college rock in the first place, for my Walk In Silence project. There is that long-lasting love for the genre and the memories that came with them, but I wanted to try to reconnect with what it was that got me interested in it in the first place. I wanted to try to remember what I was thinking at the time and what my outlook on life was, what I wanted my future to be. The trick was not to see it as a "what could have been" meandering, but more to reconnect with my original wishes and plans and see if they were still feasible.

Surprisingly, a lot of them still are, given a bit of updating and tweaking. Some of them I've already achieved, but there's more for me to do.


The next year promises to be interesting in a number of ways. I've got a lot of things planned, things I want to do, changes I want to make, projects I want to finish. I'm in a place where I can do that, so I'm not going to pass up the opportunity.

Here's to hoping 2013 is positive, creative, and fruitful.