The year seems to have flown by, and I barely got a chance to stop and see how things have been unfolding until now. I have been in a whirlwind with work, witchcraft, and a million small things that I have wanted to work through. In all, I have been immersed in a lot of internal education that I have found quite nice for a change.
At work, the new project has been a sandstorm of learning, smoothing out processes, and finding better ways to factor the steps so we don't miss anything. Taking a non-existent project team and slowly shaping them into a set of roles and giving them a sense of ownership has been a learning experience in itself. Taking on the challenge of refactoring the expectations of a client is even more instructive, but I believe we are well on the way to managing the way they view their own organization and making the necessary mental leaps to recognize the value this kind of foundation might provide.
At home, we are finally seriously thinking about where we want to live, or how we may manage going back and forth to Chicago. While I am excited at the possibilities, I was really hoping to park myself in the boonies and put up some telescopes for recreational astronomy. No matter how we work it out, I am glad we are finally taking the real step into this phase of our life.
Personally, I have been a reading fanatic. My Kindle is loaded, the bookshelves are crowded, and my brain has been packed with all kinds of useful and useless knowledge about witchcraft, philosophy, and psychology. All it really interconnects, so it is hard to figure out where to start and on which fences to build a gate. I have been feeling the urge to write again, and I think the Amazon Vella is a good way to fill this desire. In that vein, I have been working out how to keep a thread of storytelling going in an episodic manner without really making any kind of final closure. However, most action series have a fundamental conflict to resolve and they are constantly thwarted. I have mostly painted myself into a six year period of history that I need to set the story. The question becomes how many chapters I can reasonably set in those years to have a story worth reading.