I can’t believe it’s August already. I say that every month but the beginning of August means I’m less than a month away from my birthday. This year marks 36 years on the planet; 3 full Chinese zodiacs. It feels… momentous.<\/p>\n
…Mind you, I say that every year too.<\/p>\n
I sold a short story recently to Theme of Absence<\/a> and they ask each author to pick five questions out of a list of 20 and turn it into a little mix-and-match interview. I had just finished Embers\/Ignition<\/a> and I was feeling optimistic and sentimental. So I picked as one of my five: “What are your writing goals for the next five years?”<\/p>\n And I realized, for the first time in my life, I actually have<\/em> a five-year plan. Not just a vague direction (“I’d like to be employed and saving up for…something”) but actual goals<\/strong>, with timelines and intermediate steps and agendas. It’s a weird feeling. I spent most of my 20s and the first half of my 30s in a cycle of “find work, pay rent, repeat” which, coupled with depression, made me disinclined to look at the future in anything more than the haziest terms.<\/p>\n But the haze is–if not clearing, exactly–at least parting enough to see the immediate path. I’ve got short-term, mid-term, and even, yes, long-term goals, and it’s pretty scary for me. It’s new ground. It’s uncertain.<\/p>\n But at least the steps are visible now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This year marks 36 years on the planet; 3 full Chinese zodiacs. It feels… momentous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[97,63],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-personal","tag-goals","tag-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":903,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions\/903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}