Month-in-Review Highlights: December 2024

The entirety of our December holiday decorations. Simple, sure, but just-right festive for me. Lausanne, Switzerland. December 2, 2024.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends. Previously, I used these posts to hold myself accountable on progress toward my annual goals. Starting in January 2023, I broadened these posts to address more generally my observations and experiences for the month. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

In my December wrap-ups, I add overall reflections on the year to my thoughts about how I progressed against the year’s goals (and somewhat in general) since the previous month.

No exception for 2024.

I had some lofty objectives, writing-wise, for December. That meant I scrambled to get my planned blog posting done—a scrambling that involved several seconds of wondering whether I really needed to stick to the plan I’d set a year ago for the blog posts. However, I’m a stubborn one, and I wasn’t going to fail on my 2024 blog-posting goal because of a more recently set writing goal, goshdarnit, so I got the blog posts done and the blog’s Letter researched and drafted and tested sent and, oh yes, indeed, I hit my targets for my novel writing.

I’ve had this blog since 2012 and it’s evolved over the years, as anything that lasts that long will. I have a few musings around how I will evolve it again in 2025, but we’ll see how those pan out. For 2024, status quo reigned again, as planned.

I had lofty goals for my fiction work as well in 2024. Those goals, though, evolved as the year progressed and my thoughts about that work I had underway changed along with the growth in my craft and in my perspectives on the work.

The novel I sent to agents for consideration at the beginning of the year, I have long since relegated to a drawer as a learning experience. The novel that I had hoped to have ready to send to agents for consideration in early 2025 and that I worked on for the entirety of 2024, now awaits my own further consideration. As hard as I’ve worked on it, and as improved as I believe it to be after all my efforts, I am not sure I am excited enough about it to send it to agents as a first novel foray. We’ll see.

A novel I had in the planning stages in 2024 moved into the drafting phases ahead of schedule, which felt like a nice win after the other two novels didn’t live up to my hopes and dreams. This one may not, either, but as of this moment, in its current draft form, I really, really like it. Fingers crossed.

I’ve given a lot of real estate in this post to my fiction work, I see.

Well, fiction writing was not the only thing I had on my 2024 goals, not by any measure, but it was definitely the goal area that lit me up the most (obviously).

On other fronts, I more clearly overshot or overshot my objectives.

I had plans to broaden my cultural horizons and to learn new things, and I mostly overshot those goals. I had goals on the health and wellness fronts that I exceeded as well.

As to areas where I didn’t measure up, well. I had goals to make my home a cozier place and I undershot those, alas. On the cozy front, I had goals to build and reinforce my social connections this year that I didn’t make happen, either. Same goes for some (though not all) of the regular-work focus areas and some (though not all) of the life-administrative plans I’d made for the year. Frankly, I tried cramming too much into my plans for 2024 and everything couldn’t get done, no matter how hard I tried. I had to triage, in the end. Lesson learned for 2025 goal planning.

December 2024, I devoted to meeting my writing objectives as far in advance of the end of the year as possible so that I could spend quality time unwinding with my spouse before the advent of 2025. Miraculously, despite the stretch goals I set, I made that happen.

May 2025 treat us all as gently as possible.