We finally made it: 2020 is now in the past. Of course, changing the calendar page didn’t make all the problems of 2020 go away, but who knows? 2021 might eventually be the reprieve we’ve been waiting for. The year things start going our way. The glorious time when the “new normal” can go back to the plain old normal, and we can see smiles and offer hugs again. That is my biggest hope and dream for 2021–to be able to see friends’ unmasked faces and offer more than a fist-bump.

My other hopes are more mundane.

First is the simple hope of actually keeping up with this blog. Don’t know whether you noticed, but I haven’t been all that great about keeping a regular schedule. 2019 brought cancer and heart problems to my family and 2020 had us moving from one town to another during a pandemic, so I admit to being a bit distracted. Not to mention the fact that WordPress changed its format, which is infuriating. I’m used to the old way. I knew every keystroke, every command, and typing a post was as natural as breathing. Now, I have to think about what I’m doing and figure out how to do it. This is not intuitive. Yes, they have a tutorial–aren’t we all proud of them for that?–but when all I want to do is to get my post written and scheduled so I can move on to the next thing on my ever-growing list of vital to-dos, I don’t want to waste time going through a tutorial so I can figure out how to do something I once could do without the slightest bit of effort.

You notice I have an image on this post, right? It took me all of 10 minutes to figure out how to upload it, edit it, resize it, center it, and check it to see if it’s okay. I assume it is. And it really was amazingly easy once I figured it out, but ten minutes is too long to waste on working out something that I could do without thinking using the old format.

My next hopes are all business related. As an editor, I’m in good shape. I’m booked well into the spring. Marketing bit the dust in 2020–at least all my in-person events and sales. I would love to get back on my circuit and shake hands with my fans again, but if not that, I’d at least like to do better in cyberspace this year than last. As a writer, the best I can manage is keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll have time or at least be able to make time to write. My last publication was Loving a Harvey Girl, a novella in the 2019 collection The Cowboys. The last thing I wrote, Upstaged by Love, was a novella for a collection that didn’t pan out. So my hope for my writing career in 2021 is to turn that novella into a novel and then into a series.

Will any of these daydreams come true? I don’t know. I never know, actually. Neither do the rest of us, I suppose. But this year is different. This year, we’re revisiting 2019. Mom’s cancer, once thought gone for good, has apparently come back. MSB’s heart is still offering sensations that are odd enough and worrisome enough that he has to get it checked again. Sometimes his pulse hovers around 40, and he gets weak and dizzy. So with him and Mom and my own curiosities–a whole other story, believe me–I have no clue what’s going to happen as far as business goes. I might be spending another year visiting doctors and putting out fires.

This blog may again become another hodge-podge of writing, reading, and personal posts. But since I started it, back when it was 777 Peppermint Place instead of Linda W. Yezak, it has defied classification. It is what it is. I just hope I don’t neglect it as badly as I did last year.

So there ya go. Here’s a clink of the coffee mug to the first Monday of 2021. May this New Year’s infant grow into a happy, healthy adult that isn’t quite so stingy with its joy as 2020 was.