Repeat after me, everyone: there’s no place like home!
As previously mentioned, my oil sands job has come to an end (don’t worry, it’s meant to happen that way!) and on this past Saturday I undertook the several-flights through several-cities journey to return home to my ridiculously excited husband and daughter. It was a long journey (I don’t know that I’ve ever had a straightforward flight across Canada…) but I was grinning ear-to-ear during the entire thing because FOUR MONTHS AWAY FROM HOME YOU GUYS.
Of course, being home again means that my world is going to be a little topsy-turvy again. It simultaneously feels like I’ve been gone forever and like I’ve hardly been away at all. My brain is definitely going to have a bit of a time readjusting. I was away for the little one starting school, so I have no idea how that stuff works this year, and I’ve been away from the YouTube channel for so long that I’m not even sure where to start. Meanwhile I’m getting home just in time for Halloween, which is a time of year that’s always huge for us so I’m going to be trying to work my head around that for the next few days. NaNoWriMo starts soon and I really want to take part this year, but also we might take a trip down to Maine for some Christmas shopping… Yeah, the list goes on! It’s so awesome to be home though, you guys have no idea!
Meanwhile, as can likely be understood, health and exercise stuff totally went out the window the past few days. I didn’t eat too badly because I was staying with my cousin for a few days before my flights, and I got a bit of exercise walking all over hell’s creation just for something to do while she and her husband were at work. But just, in general, I’m all off the rails. I don’t know if I’m going to bother going back to Keto or not, at least not until the new year, because the last two months of the year are so insanely busy for us, normally, that I really just don’t have the kind of time that’s required to plan and prepare Keto food. I am, however, intending to get back into the exercise and kick it up a notch by going to P90X. The program worked wonders for Jason and myself back before we got married, and I think it’s time to bump it up since I did P90 for closer to 120 days. 😛 Plus, I’ve plateaued something fierce, and I need to shake it up a bit to get out of that!
Okay, now that I’ve coffee’d my way through all that, let’s get these goals talked about so I can get on with the hundred things I have to do today (isn’t it funny how you can be so much busier while unemployed than when you’re working? lol)!
Goal #1: Write half a million words.
Writing too a bit of a backseat this week, particularly when it came to all the travelling because that’s always so exhausting and I just end up staring at the blank page, drooling a little, not know what the hell is even going on. For that reason (mostly) this was the first week in many that I didn’t actually hit the goal Pacemaker.press had set for me, but I wasn’t off by that much. Pacemaker set me a goal of 17.5k, and I wrote 16,751 words. That’s still pretty damn admirable, obviously, so I’m not terribly upset with myself or anything!
The key is going to be keeping it up now that I’m home. It sounds ridiculous to say out loud, but somehow it seems so much more difficult to find the time to sit down and write when I’m home and unemployed! It’s one of the great mysteries of the writing universe, to be honest. I was killing it while working 10-12 hour days, and now it’s going to suddenly become the hardest thing in the world to pull off, you watch!
That said, I’m determined to not let being home throw me too far off course. I’ve been doing so well these past few months, especially considering how painful the first half-or-so of the year was. I can’t let it all go to waste now!
- Goal #1a: Write at least a quarter million fictional words. Of those 16.7k words I wrote last week, about 10.6k of them were fictional, split roughly equally between The Other World, Good Omens fan-fic, and this short story I (re)wrote for my Patreon. The non-fiction numbers actually went up a bit this week as I’ve been trying to kill those last few TraceysBasement,com posts so that I’ll finally be caught up, but the majority of the words are still firmly in the fictional category, so thumbs up to that!
Goal #2: Read at least 50 books.
I’m not going to lie: last week I read something like three chapters of Capturing the Devil, plus finished off one of the longest fan-fics I’ve ever read (over 100k words!) because it was easy to read on my phone while I was on buses/in cars/waiting in line at the airport/etc. Considering the length of the fan-fic, though, I’m absolutely finding a book of equal value to claim on my Goodread’s challenge. Plus, to be honest you guys, this particular fic was better than some bestsellers I’ve read, so…#sorrynotsorry
Goal #3: Build my social media communities…EVERYWHERE!
I did my best to put a bit more of a focus on this stuff while I was waiting for my flights. Strangely, I felt like I got less done. And yet…
Last week’s numbers are as follows:
- The YouTube channel gained 3 subscribers
- The YouTube Twitter account went up 6 followers
- The YouTube Instagram account gained 6 followers
- The Snapchat account’s score went up 16 points
- The Author Twitter account went up 5 followers
- The Author Instagram account gained 3 followers
HOT DAMN an all-positive week!!! I’m not entirely certain how that’s happened on this particular week when I was so all over the place, but I’ll take it!
Goal #4: Play more (proper) video games.
I did not, in fact, end up playing any Dead Nation over the course of my days waiting to fly home. But that’s okay, because I am, in fact, home now! And there will be games forthcoming. Not immediately since we only have a few days to deal with all the Halloween stuff, and it’s obviously too late in the year at this point to get all that much gaming in now, but there will definitely be some gaming of the relaxing variety in my very-near future.
Goal #5: Put more time, focus, and energy into the YouTube channel.
For my last week out in the oil sands (for the time being, anyway) I decided to put a major push on to finish up those damn TraceysBasement.com posts. I didn’t manage it in the end (part of the reason being that the internet at Montreal Treudeau airport was absolutely useless beyond the telling of it), but I did put a ton of effort into it, and now I’m only a few more posts behind. And now that I’m home I’ll obviously be starting to do REAL channel stuff again like, you know…filming videos and the like! Go me! 😀
I feel like my brain melted a little more with each sentence I wrote for this post. Is that how it translated? If so, I apologize, but yeah…I’m home and my brain is running around in a million different directions with all the stuff I want and have to do, so I’m certain you’ll forgive me. ❤
How was your week? Did you accomplish any goals? Make any new ones? Do anything else that made you feel awesome and accomplished? Feel free to share in the comments!
Tracey Tobin 