Master List of Progress Reports - 2008

2008: Year In Review

No new chapters again.

Unfortunately, I think this year was worse than the year before when it came to writing.

And after more than two years, I finally gave up on Mambo when an update that should've fixed certain issues broke my site instead. That's when I switched to hardcoding it all myself and only using a few PHP scripts to get some of the functionality I'd been using Mambo for. But that also meant I had to scrap (or at least recode) a lot of the work I'd already done, which made me feel like I was back at square one (it wasn't really that bad, but it was disheartening to say the least). On the bright side, getting rid of Mambo pretty much reduced my testing time down to nothing (I wasn't having to search for hours in code I was unfamiliar with to find out why something that should've worked didn't).

I was also still working on renovations, having finally moved on to the office after finishing the bathroom in 2006, the living room in 2007, and the first half of the kitchen earlier in the year. I don't think having the house torn apart for several years helped much with my writing.

Towards the end of the year, my cat Akasha was diagnosed with kidney disease. Giving her medication against her will on a daily basis and injecting her with subcutaneous fluids every other day was stressful beyond anything I would have thought if someone had simply told me that's what they were doing to try to keep their cat alive. We didn't know it at the time, but we only had a few more months left with her.

Moral of the Story

Sometimes you just do the best you can.

I wish I could say I suddenly had a handle on my life, that I'd been able to prioritize and organize my life to get the maximum done on any given day, and you know, maybe I did. Maybe that was the best I could do at the time. I might not have gotten as much written on my stories as I would've liked, and I might not have gotten the site done, but I got through, I got the renovations done, and I think that's still valid and important. One of these days, I'll actually learn to cut myself some slack. Maybe the next time I'm getting down on myself, I'll come read this stuff and remind myself that yes, writing is important to me, but I also have to live my life and sometimes stuff is not under my control.