Today is the first day of the rest of my life

[Sorry.]

It was a nice neat bookend on Sunday with my last show for the year wrapping up, and a VDL award for Baskerville. Seems like as good a time as any for a sea-change. Or at least a break from stuff I’ve been doing lots of (theatre) and more time for things I haven’t.

So what’s next? Plans are worthless, as we know, but in the spirit of planning being everything, here’s what I see the next few years being like.

Running

I am going to give this another crack. I’ll still ride a bike, but commuting is becoming less attractive, and road riding is .. meh. Too many dickheads in cars. I really enjoy running, it’s more time efficient, and it entertains the dogs. So to keep my fitness up, running makes a lot more sense. If I can just convince my heal to put up and shut up.

Reading

Just do it. And prioritise long form over short. It’s been going pretty well recently, and I’ve knocked over a lot of books, including a mix of fiction and non. So I’ll be doing more of that (and less of Twitter and the “news”).

wRiting

This is the big one. I’ve always “wanted to write”, but just as consistently not actually done it. Time to suck it up. One of the most interesting“writing tips” I’ve seen recently (beyond the evergreen “just do it”) is not to get hung up on perfection. Something is better than nothing. Editing is easier than staring at a blank page. You don’t want to end up like Joseph Grand in Camus’s The Plague…

This is also a major career focus for me now — not necessarily to become “a writer” in any formal sense, but to focus on writing as a way of doing my job.

Return to study

Another thing I’ve “always wanted to do” is tertiary study. I had good reasons for dropping out of uni early, and I don’t regret that decision. But I do really want to go back. Next year, 2020, is going to be the year. It will be part time of course, since I still need to pay the mortgage and feed everyone, but I’ve got to make a start somewhere.

Music

This is definitely out at the speculative end of this plan, but maybe I’ll get back to playing music a bit more. I got my amp fixed, and I promised Andrew that I’d play for his 50th. Who knows where else it will go? No biggie.

So there we have it. My plan. Come at me, reality