It’s been a while. I know. I could just say I’ve been busy, but how many of us are really that busy when we drop some of the things we love most? I mean… realistically I did have time. I just didn’t organise it as well, or perhaps I spent too much time on other things.

That being said… I really was quite busy. There was a lot going on for me in the later months of last year, but I’m looking to have far more free time to myself this year. We always have this impression of a new year as a new beginning, as if it is the year alone that can turn our entire life around.

Don’t get me wrong, things do change. Some for the better, some for the worst. Some of us might actually stick to our new years’ resolutions. Some of us might make the same one that we’ve failed six times already. What’s important is that we try.

Rather than trying to ever fill our lives with new things, though, why not try looking into the things you’ve enjoyed in the past? Okay, so some of them are things we may have ditched for good reason. The thing is, many of us are always looking for that next big thing in our own lives. I’m the same with writing.

I’ve forever and always got new ideas for one project or another. I always have far more new ideas than I have time and energy to spend on them. If I ever want to get any of my projects completed, though, I need to be able to take the time to look back and pick up where I left off. I often have five or six projects ‘actively’ in my mind. In truth, I work on one or two.

This isn’t a very good approach for actually getting work done. Success involves a focused effort towards one’s goal, not flitting between everything and having nothing very close to completion. So it is with writing. We can become dazed with all the new ideas, with the novelty of a fresh slate to write on. Our well-cultivated concepts often go stale as a result.

By all means, do feel free to abandon an idea if you feel there is nothing more to be done with it. You want to spend the majority of your time and effort on your very best stories and concepts. In time, though, we might learn to appreciate the old ideas we had. So it is with life.

There’s always something in our past worth revisiting, even if there are plenty of things that are not. If you want to revitalise your future, it might just be worth re-re-rediscovering your past. Maybe it’ll be just the same as you remembered… but perhaps it won’t.

When I looked back on my past year, though, I saw that there were plenty of things that I had started and stopped. Many of them I missed. Just one of them is writing here. I may be a little rusty, but I’m keen to be blogging again. So expect to see more of me, and hopefully a slight reinvention of the Elspeth Morcaya series – I’ll have all twenty short stories up over the course of the next year.

And ask yourself… what is it that you want to rediscover?