Month-in-Review Highlights: October 2020

Full-on autumn magic on a post-rainy morning along the walking path next to Lake Geneva. October 24, 2020.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends, reflecting on what happened in general and, more specifically, in the context of my goals. Though I don’t share all my insights here, I have made it a practice to share at least one key highlight or insight. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

Last year in the autumn, I started going to a weekly writing session, during which I finally made some progress on my fiction after a long dry spell. (Attentive readers may recall my mention of said progress in one of last year’s postmortems.)

And then I stopped attending the writing group to make room for French classes. Then the holidays arrived, after which we had only a moment to take a deep breath before COVID-19 hit, followed by the combined combustion of 2020 that sucked all the oxygen out of everything—including my fiction efforts.

I made a few fits-and-starts with the novel outline over the course of the summer, trying to nail down the broad beams of the story’s framework. Time and again, I lapsed into inertia.

After a midsummer postmortem during which I realized I hadn’t made any progress on my long-work writing goals for the year, I decided to pull back a bit on the blog writing. Try as I might, I only have so much time for hobbies. Observing Leslie is an addictive and rewarding creative outlet—and one that will continue—yet I needed to redirect some of my flex time to make the novel happen. Averaging one post per week on the site has worked well enough for the moment.

As COVID-19 continues to make in-person anything—including writing groups—a risky-to-impossible proposition, I’ve turned to on-line writing groups. I’ve attended a few on-line gatherings that others have hosted and, after the Lausanne writing-group coordinator departed for her home country and offered me the organizer role for the group, I’ve started hosting one myself. It’s taken a few tries to find a day and time that works for even a few people on a regular basis, but a core set of writers finally managed to meet once a week every single week in October. I’ve consecrated my group sessions to the novel project, which has forced excellent progress.

Also, a screenwriter I met at last year’s writing group in Lausanne reached out to see if I’d like to hold weekly accountability and brainstorming sessions; we started our once-a-week meetings via Skype in October. Having bite-sized goals for the novel project—on which I must regularly report—and having someone with whom I can share sticky points unlocked even more progress for me.

In fact, in October, I managed to finish my story framework and flag the post on which I planned to start full on construction.

Yes, these sound like minor steps, and they are. Yet even one step counts as progress.

I reported to Arnaud that I’d managed to get back to the novel finally. He replied that he’d heard this from me last year at the same time, which made it something of a seasonal theme.

Yet I think it’s only fair to call it a seasonal theme if it happens three years in a row. Right?

I certainly won’t get the full first draft of the novel written by the end of this year—the goal I’d set at the end of 2019 for 2020—yet I’ll keep at it. This time, I have the support structure in place to help me maintain momentum. If I can start drafting in November and December, it will feel really, really good.