Today’s the last day of a week’s vacation, and I’ve spent the time away from the office in a comptemplative haze. You can take that however you want, and you’ll probably be right in at least some aspect, but much has come out of the mental downtime. I always come away from these extended retreats from the orthocosm feeling incredibly refreshed and ready to start tackling the future.

I tried to get some projects started last year, and I made a fair few inroads into things, but I have to continue the work I started, and cover new ground besides:

• I want to create a more public home for my diet and fitness tracking that actually feels like it’s being read. It’s too easy to lose track of days, weeks, and months if all I use is a local tool. Even with the other people I have friended in MyFitnessPal, the few bits of connection there aren’t really helpful.
• I want to find a place to talk about financial progress on the various debts that have been incurred in the course of taking care of Station Beta. This ties into lots of thoughts I have about investment, safety, interdependence, and emergency preparedness. I’d like to find a place to keep talking about this that won’t feel like rubbing large numbers in people’s muzzles involuntarily.
• I want to start work on at least one of my planned novels this year, in addition to continuing to release short stories for public consumption. I also want to discuss the process of writing itself more.
• I also want to read more, though that’s hard because my time windows for that feel so limited. I’m going to include non-fiction here, because there’s a lot of research I want to do for a bunch of projects, but I do need to include at least some fiction in this list.
• I want to put down my magical theory—as well as my cosmology, epistemology, and ethics—in a form that others can digest, not just random scribblings across a thousand pages of notes in various notebooks. This may itself become an ongoing writing project in the “non-fiction” or at least “less-fictive” vein.
• I want to start detailing my longterm plans for Beta, and I want to see how many of them I can actually set into motion. This one is going to take legal help, but I need to explore them sooner rather than later.
• I want to make a list of what’s actually wrong with the house in a central location so I can prioritize paying down structural debt alongside a lot of the fancy-schmancy stuff I want to do like upgrade the electrical in the living room, expand our garden plots, replace all my furniture.
• I want to sort out the project-tracking system for the website so others can nominate writing tasks that aren’t whichever bit of Serious Writing I’m hammering upon in exchange for support.
• I want to launch and complete one anthology through some publisher so I can get a taste of the editing process.
• I want to make demonstrable progress on Lemnos, comparable to Halcyon in ways that I can use to externalize the paracosm in my head for others.

That’s probably enough to get me started, and really if I’m honest, that’s probably more than I can actually manage. Still, that’s a plan, and I’ll see how much I can actually do. Anything I can’t finish, I’ll track to next year. Some of this will be easier to do than others, but it’s all worth doing, and it’s all important.

The Work Continues.