February 9, 2023: Off to A Great Start

Whew! Hey, strangers, it’s good to see you again! The first 40 days of this year have been extremely busy. To say I’ve bitten off more than I can chew is, well, generous. Despite having trouble keeping on top of this blog even when it was the only thing I was doing, I decided to set a goal for myself: finish a novel and get in the hands of an agent of publisher by year’s end. Good goal, really. And quite doable.

Except I’d also committed to launching my podcast, The Next Town Over, on January 3rd. Despite all of my best intentions, I was behind schedule even before I’d started. We did pull off the launch, and the launch party, and now have 8 episodes (I even think they’re pretty good, honestly) and social media pages to manage on top of research, outlining, recording, and editing.

We also haven’t quite let up on the constant traveling, yet. After returning from Luxembourg (which I wrote a blog post about but apparently never posted, an oversight which I intend to investigate upon completion of this post and hope to rectify immediately, so come back and look for the down-low on Luxembourg tomorrow), we went to Dubrovnik for Nicole’s birthday, and two days after that I left for my cousin’s wedding in Chicago. The jet lag was intense when I returned to Montenegro, but I’m now back on a diurnal schedule! We leave for Zagreb, Croatia in two weeks, where we will spend five days before flying to Marrakech, Morocco only to turn around a month later and head for Toulouse, France.

Yeah, I’m confused, too.

So I packed my schedule with blogging, noveling, podcasting and traveling. Basically three 20-hour-a-week jobs while constantly on the go. Which, really, should have been enough.

But my overenthusiastic butt thought, “you know what would be a great idea? Taking a journalism class to help me become a better blogger! You know what else would be great? Taking a business finance class to help me understand how to monetize all this content I’m creating!” And promptly signed up for two college classes.

Unfortunately, I paid for the classes, so those are top-priority because I want to get my money’s worth. The podcast has a rigid posting schedule, a cohost relying on me, and more potential for monetization, so that’s a pretty high-priority, too. I’ve been talking about writing a novel since I was ten, and I really want to make it happen before I’m thirty, so that’s up there on the priorities list. And I don’t know when or if I’ll be coming back to any of these fantastic places I’m visiting, so sightseeing and going out to enjoy them is important, too.

Which kind of puts this blog on the bottom of the heap.

Not to say that it isn’t important. I love this blog. This is actually the first time I’ve genuinely loved blogging. I’ve finally figured out how to have fun with this, how to be honest and informative while cracking dumb jokes and laughing at life. I feel like I’ve found my voice here, in a way that I didn’t while blogging about van life or previous travel experiences. The problem is I’m doing a lot of important things right now, and this happens to be the least critical.

I’m not abandoning it. My goal is four posts a month. However, I think it’s highly unlikely that’s going to happen. I think, at least between now and May, I’ll be lucky to find time for one or two posts a month.

I’ll probably adopt a new strategy. Posts might get shorter, or less complete. You might see a post about one incident in Zagreb rather than the whole five days were there.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for sticking with me. I’m going to take a look at that Luxembourg post, hopefully give you something to read, and I’ll try to be back with a post about Dubrovnik sooner rather than later (that’s what bus rides are for… right?)