AMA - Your Questions Answered

Part 2, ish.

Welcome back to part two-ish.

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Q. What do I expect life will give me in the next five years?

A. In five years my oldest will be graduating high school, and my second will be a short year behind him, my three youngest spread across middle school and elementary. At the present, we have a dear friend who provides child care and has recently taken over homeschooling our three youngest, over a number of hours spread over four days a week so that I can write and read and learn and refine my skills with the intention of pursuing writing as a career. There are specific goals I have in relation to each of my children that I won’t detail here for privacy reasons, but suffice it to say I very much hope to know and guide each of them well.

• If I’m not being overly cautious, I hope to have completed and posted a fanfiction by 2027 and to have completed my own independent work by 2029.

• I want to own and manage an Airbnb with a subdued art deco theme and a second Airbnb that is specifically designed to be “family of small children” friendly. I’ve been pulling together inspiration here and there and the next step is to start looking into the practical aspect: legalities, funding/costs, location, risk/benefit analysis, etc.

• In five years, my goal is to have all of my youngest children in school (rather than being home schooled) and I hope my husband and I can have random in the “middle of the day” dates - coffee, hikes, walks around the neighborhood, and kisses in the kitchen between projects.

Photo by MIO ITO on Unsplash

Q. What’s your top personal and professional goals this year?

A. I just desperately want to write. Personally, professionally, existentially, fantastically - all of it. I ache to put words on paper, whether those words are strictly for my eyes, capturing memories for my family, leaving my children a history they can hold in their hands when I’m gone, or whether it is to share here on Substack and hopefully some day as a fiction author. Life being such that it is, there are, of course, a whole lot of other responsibilities to balance with that - bills to pay, kids to raise, a house to try and manage, relationships to tend. All the good stuff.

2025 Goals:

In March of 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien delivered a series of lectures at the University of St. Andrews, Fairy Stories, exploring the nature of fairy tales and defending their places in the lives of adult readers. He would later expand on the lectures and publish On Fairy Stories in 1947. I enjoyed an exploration of this essay last October, hosted by Clifford Stumme and Eric Falden. As a romance reader, I immediately began wanting a similar exploration for the romance genre and have decided to apply myself accordingly. That set off my study of the history of the romance genre. This year’s goal is to complete all my Greek Comedy reading and write several essays detailing what I’ve learned to ensure it sticks. After wrapping this up, it is my intention to formulate a study plan for the Romance Movement.

Professional

1. Reading & Education:

   1. Study for and take my GED.

   2. Continue my Romance Genre research.

   3. Take two/three months to reread Julius Caesar, along with several complimentary aids that

      Fr. Wesley Walker
      provided last year at The Classical Mind.

   4. Continue to (very slowly) make my way through material on how to structure essays, the different types of communication found in varying types of essays, and how to write a sentence with proper punctuation.

Long term, I want storytelling to be my profession, both independently and collaboratively. I don’t know what the heck I need to learn, who I need to know, or what particular career I should look into, but I want this like I need oxygen. I don’t expect much to take off until after I hit forty. My littlest are still pretty little and my husband’s job doesn’t lend to the amount of flexibility that I value for this stage of parenting, so I’m keeping my outside the home responsibilities as flexible as possible. My primary focus right now is learning: get my GED, relearn English/grammar, study story well written stories, write, read and figure out what my options for a career are.

Personal

1. Marriage.

   1. I want to get better at taking my husband out on dates - ones that I plan and execute. I think one of the things that is important in any longer term relationship is the knowing that your partner/spouse is continuously growing and changing just as you are. I want to put in the time to know him not just as he was in our early years, nor as he is now, but who he is continuing to grow into. (he might, at this juncture, point out that not humoring the kids every time they interrupt us would be a good step in the right direction - I’m working on it).

2. Fitness.

   1. Fitness for me has always been ‘what is the bare minimum I can get by with that allows for healthy function and reasonable bmi?’. The idea of specific goals or a defined musculature was never even on my radar. Over the course of my life I’ve wanted to be, well, not skinny exactly as I don’t have the body structure for that, but trim? I was quite content in my little “I don’t need defined anything” bubble until Arcane Season 2 hit.

      

      I don’t know quite how to explain it, except that this fantastic character pictured above, Sevika, whom I loath to admire, completely flipped my fitness goals on their heads. It’s not like this series is lacking in fit, capable female characters and its not that I particularly love Sevika: I respect her, begrudgingly, but I don’t particularly like her. But when she shows up in Season 2, Episode 2 and puts herself on the line for Jinx (does she though? - its debatable) there’s this crazy, chaotic, fight scene, a fantastic marriage of Jinx’s color and unpredictability with Sevika’s more centered physical strength and presence. As Sevika moves in this scene, the raw power in her form struck me like a soccer ball to the head. Dear readers, my brain chemistry was altered. I now have a new fitness goal that I have dubbed, “Sevika’s Abs”.

Thank you for the questions!

What about each of you? What goals do you have for 2025?