First Day Back

So yesterday was the first workday of 2021, and I'd be lying if I said I was ready for it. I'm not. I mean, I am valiantly attempting to be a responsible adult here, but that's a lot of hard work. 

Still, I've got the boys more or less on schedule (I hope) and if we can just get a few other things to fall into place, we can probably heave a great sigh of relief and settle back to... Oh, who am I kidding? By then something else will have come up. 

Runoff elections are happening in Georgia today, with one party on the side of "everybody get out and vote" and the other party on the side of "democracy is bad if we don't win" and I just... I am so fucking sick of the whole thing. Like, every time I think we've got shit settled, 2020 rises back up like the serial killer in an 80s horror movie: I mean sure, you shot him fourteen times and pushed him out a fourth floor window, but the body isn't down there on the lawn any more. I need the Republican party to take the advice that people were so gleefully giving me after the 2016 election: You lost! Get over it! 

...And I can't believe that I feel like that rebuke needs to be given to the fucking President of the goddam United States of America, but here we are. 

We were supposed to play D&D last night, but we wound up postponing for a week; apparently I'm not the only one who's having trouble getting back into a work schedule and getting his shit together in general. Which is probably a good thing for my sleep schedule, but gods it would have been therapeutic to go around smacking bad guys with an imaginary sword. 

Meanwhile, I've switched story projects again -- or I think I have. I wrote about three pages on the new idea, and while that was a couple of days ago and I'm not going to end up using any of what I wrote, it helped me see what didn't work and what didn't really hold my attention, which gives me a better feel for what direction I want to go. 

The old project, at its heart, featured a maze-like city (based very loosely on Rome) of high walls and narrow streets, in a world where magic is a language and the air carries an ecosystem as complex as the land and sea do. The protagonist was a twenty-something whose powers were directly connected to the curse that had overtaken the city. 

The new project is sort of "Harry Potter but for monsters" concept. The protagonist is a young man --  about fourteen, I think -- who's developing dark powers that he doesn't entirely control, and as a result gets sent off to magic school under the theory that they should be better equipped to deal with him. 

Honestly, when I write it out that simply, they don't sound all that different (and there are definitely some similarities) but the key difference -- for me as a writer -- isn't so much in the concept as it is that right now I have at least a half-dozen conflicting ideas about what I want to do with the first project, whereas for new project I have a much cleaner idea of what drives the overall conflicts and how it all works. So in theory, all I need now is time and energy to write it. (Ha!)

So that's my start on 2021: I've successfully gotten everyone else up and ready to go -- as much as anyone can be, anyway -- our political situation still sucks, and I have a new writing project that I'm feeling darkly optimistic about. How are the rest of you holding up?