New Year always seems a little repetitive. With each New Year that comes around it’s the same old things, the same promises and for about a week it’s something that we all manage to do – sometimes even a little longer than that. With 2021 now in the swing of things, I’ve forgotten what most of my resolutions were and what few I did make, I’ve decided that they can wait a little longer before I take them up in all seriousness.
Working up to the New Year, the tail end of the Old Year is usually when we would fall into that trap the “I’ll do it next year” with the “next year will be our year and we will make a go of it” and yet, somehow it never seemed to quite happen. It was a repetitive loop, something of which seemed to start earlier and earlier with each year – why start now, when the New Year was just around the corner? Surely that’s the time when the New Starts come into being.
2020 was a strange year, between lockdowns and the sudden burst of life in the Summer, to new routines and habits forming and the changes in the way of life it almost seemed inevitable that the writing would suffer alongside of it. And, whilst I’ll admit for a fair chunk of it, it did; it didn’t suffer as much as I was expecting. I expected to enter 2021 with no plot, no storyline, no world building and even fewer characters – the characters that we did have around slowly looking like they were rapidly giving up through the amount of neglect that they were giving.
And then something miraculous happened. I can’t even say how it started, but one of our characters clicked. Just one of them. And that was all that was needed, with that one click of a character suddenly their community came to life and then the world around them … and from that moment on, writing happened. Not only writing, but world building, character development and before we knew it … we had something.
That was back in September, and somehow, we haven’t stopped. Somehow there is a sort of magic going on where, now, we almost know what we’re doing with what we have. And somehow, now there is a new motivation and a renewed love for what we’re doing …
It’s only the first week of 2021, but for once I don’t need to make that same old resolution. That this year I will do better with my writing, that this year I will keep things up to date, that this year I will write more. The resolution that needs to be made is to keep up the energy and the progress that was made at the end of last year … and who knows what magic can happen then!
Clara
Charlotte and Clara 