2020: The Year of Finding Pure Joy

After a long, long year, 2020 has finally come to a close. Many people are looking forward to leaving this year behind them and have a fresh start.

Last year, I did an overview of my year, which you can check out here, if you’re interested. I’m doing another one of those, where I’m evaluating my word of the year as well as my blog and writing life. Let’s see how much I got done despite the crazy year.

School

I finished grade 11 this year, and began grade 12 – which means I’m going to be finishing high school this year! 😱

While I was doing grade 11, the corona virus hit Canada and flipped my world – and yet, when it came to school, not much changed. I’m a homeschooler, and I’ve been doing online homeschooling for quite a few years now. In all honesty, not much changed there during the rest of the school year. (Besides how finals were run, of course.)

Meanwhile, this school year has been kind of crazy, because so many people are starting to homeschool, thanks to the pandemic. 😂 The school I attend was completely swamped, so things were a little bumpy at first.

30 level courses have a pretty big workload, but diplomas were made optional for this school year. For those of you who don’t live in Alberta, those are government given final exams worth 30% of your final grade. (Fun stuff.) I’m still waffling back and forth over whether I’ll actually do it or not, but am mostly just waiting to see what scores I get on my mocks before I make a final decision.

So… overall, school wasn’t too bad this year. Mostly, it just is a lot of work. 😛

Blog

I actually kept things pretty chill overall with my blog this year. The follower count has gone up, and there are a couple super people around that I’ve really been enjoying chatting with in the comment sections, or in reply to the emails I send out to my list. (People subscribed to my email list – and not just through WordPress – get exclusive content, as well. If you want in on that, you can subscribe here!)

Series I did this year:

• Flashbacks | This was a 2-part series where I talked about writing flashbacks – a subject I’m pretty obsessed with, honestly. (The link is to the second post in the series, since it includes a link to the first on in it as well.)
• Gearing up for NaNoWriMo 2020 | This isn’t really a series, but this post was a bit of a compilation of many different posts on my blog that I thought people should check out before National Novel Writing Month began. Since so many are mentioned in it – and since I specifically posted a blog posts in a row just so I could include them in this post – I thought I’d add it to this section, anyway.
• NaNoWriMo 2020 | For the third year in a row, I did a weekly update on my own NaNoWriMo journey during November. I’d show up every week with updates from each day, which included word count from that day, the overall word count, random stuff that happened to me/happened to my characters/my characters did to me, and, of course, snippets!! 😃 (The link is to the last post in the series, since it includes recap links to the rest of the posts at the bottom.)

Collaborations I did this year:

• How to Write Realistic Introverted Characters in 7 Steps {Collaboration!} | I did this collaboration with Mary from Wild Writing Dreams (aka my sister). She took on how to write extroverted characters in her post, and I did mine on introverted characters. That’s actually because that’s what each of us are, so we more naturally gravitate towards writing those kinds of characters. (And therefore, have a lot of practice and expertise to share on the subject 😉)
• NaNoWriMo 2020 Celebration! | I decided to celebrate the end of NaNoWriMo by sharing a bit about my current WIP – something I don’t do very often anymore. This wasn’t *exactly* a collaboration, but I did feature my writing buddy in a good chunk of it. I’d consider that we collaborated on that part, so I’m throwing it on the list. 😜 

Tags/Awards I did this year:

• 12 Days of Christmas Book Tag: 2020 Edition | I guess I was pretty serious this year, because I only did one post that was a tag – and only because it was the holiday season! 🤔 I hardly read this year – what with libraries being closed down and copious amounts of schoolwork – so I didn’t have that many options to choose from to answer these questions, but I still think it went pretty well! 😄

Motivational posts I did this year:

• When You’re at a Crossroads in Your Writing
• How to Find Happiness Despite the Chaos
• 5 Reasons Why You Need a Writing Buddy
• Why Writers Never Get Instant Gratification
• Why All Writers Should Be Using Pinterest

I actually wrote up a couple really good posts here! I think the first 2 might be my favourites.

Writing posts I did this year:

• The Domino Effect (And What it has to do with Your Writing)
• How Just One Paragraph Could Revolutionize Your Writing
• Character Problems: Not Making Things Personal from Day 1
• The Inciting Incident: The Point of No Return… or is it?
• Why You Need to Imagine
• How to (and not to) Write Foreshadowing
• Finding the Time to Write {Case Study}
• 5 Things Affected By What We Read
• Foreshadowing: The Art of Being a Ninja
• The One Thing All Stories Need
• How to Nail the Mood of Your Scene in 3 Steps
• Should You Edit While Writing
• How to Brainstorm Your Story in 5 Steps

Most of my posts from this year were writing posts (as you can see 😆) and basically each time I went to get another link to stick on here, I would see the post and remember being proud of that one. So that’s actually pretty awesome.

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I think the only post I didn’t mention was my 3-year blogiversary one, but it’s hanging around somewhere on the blog. 😜 

Writing

Writing was both absolutely nuts, and yet also much calmer this year.

• At the beginning of the year, I was working on trying to finish my 2019 NaNoWriMo novel. If you weren’t around then, that project was pretty huge. For that NaNoWriMo, I took a trilogy I’d been working on that year and combined all 3 books into just 1 big one.
• But then, after quite a while of misery, I at last decided to set it aside. Instead, I went and began working on a project I only ever mentioned in vague terms. It was a fantasy fairy tale twist story, and honestly, the ideas I had for it were really cool.
• But I was still struggling. So, I switched gears and went to attack The Triad of Caosdif, attempting to figure out how to fix this book of mine. It’s an old project, and that only lasted for… actually, I may have only done that for a few days? 🧐😅
• By about this time, corona was well and truly on a roll in my life, and I ended up writing a random story with no real plan to go off of, in a kind of test-run for my own writing process. I was struggling a bunch to write in a way that made me happy, but this book really sparked my joy again. I finished it in like, 2 1/2 weeks.
• So I took those characters and wrote another book in 3 1/2 weeks. That was also fun.
• At the beginning of summer, I actually was working on yet another random story, still concerning these same characters. I got about 30k in before I decided that I needed to switch gears and write something else.
• And so, for the rest of the year, starting right at the end of July, I was working on my current WIP. I brainstormed it, researched stuff for it (a lot of research) outlined it, made character arcs for it, and brought everything together in one huge 22k long plot line. I began working on actually writing the book for NaNoWriMo this year, and am still working on it. (Though, fun news! I’m just 1 scene away from the disaster moment in my book, and after that, I’ll dive in the 3rd – and final – act of my book. *rubs hands together gleefully*)

I think my writing projects were less hectic than last year, but the way I look at writing and how I tackle it changed drastically. I honestly prefer that, and am much happier with where I currently stand in my writing.

Personal Life

Last year, I talked about how I made 2019 the year of the jump. I actually revealed my word at the beginning of the year, which was pure joy.

As you can imagine, that one was a bit difficult to tackle this year. But I honestly believe that I gave it my best, and I think I came out of the year better because of that. It was especially needed during the first half of the year, and I hope to carry it on through my life. 😊 

Once again, I won’t be revealing my new word for the coming year. But I am determined to make 2021 super epic.

Here we come, world.

If you want to stick around and go through this coming year with me, make sure that you subscribe! It’s only going to get better from here 😉 

How was your year?

Did you like all these posts I did this past year?

Which one was your favourite? 😜

-Julia

Photo by Danil Aksenov on Unsplash