The start of 2026 has been a slow one for me. Although I do have a short story included in an anthology (which you can find here) and that is incredibly exciting, progress has been hard to find in other areas of my writing. Drafts have barely moved on, I’ve been unable to focus entirely on my manuscripts, and pencil plans for goals have been pushed on. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.
Life has gotten in the way. A lot. From having to move, to pressures at my place of work to other, various personal things, I think a lot has come my way over the past few month. These are all things that have taken away from both my time and my ability to write.
It’s one thing for you to have no physical time, with evenings being taken up with boxing and unboxing, but it’s another when your mind is so drawn and exhausted that, when you do have time, you can’t use it because you have no mental capacity to create. Creating does take a mental effort, and if you’ve got too much going on in other parts of your life, then you can’t give anything to that creativity.
With all that going on, that means 2026 hasn’t gotten off to a roaring start. When that sort of thing happens, it’s something you just have to accept. Not every month is going to be better than the last, there will be times when you’re writing less than you were before, for all sorts of reasons. It can be frustrating, but it’s part of the ebb and flow of creating, which aligns, often, with the ebb and flow of life.
You can never give more than you have, and it’s important not to wear yourself thin if you’ve got other things going on. Prioritising over your creativity isn’t often a fun decision to make, it can be a little demoralising to have to choose to do things other than write, even if you know how important those other things are.
But it’s a necessity. No matter how much I would rather be writing, I knew that getting myself unpacked or needing to maintain my health and wellbeing was important. Sometimes too many things come at once and you have to let something you love go to the background, even if that has the potential to make you feel worse. But it’s for the best in the long-term, even when it doesn’t feel like it in the short term.
So I haven’t been writing as much these first couple of months into 2026 as I would have hoped. Progress has been slow and, in some cases, even nonexistent. With so much going on at times, I’ve had very little time to dedicate to my projects, even though I’d love nothing more than to spend an hour or two just tapping away at a keyboard. Either my mind hasn’t been in the right place, or my body hasn’t because I’ve been physically doing other things. Even with this blog, I’d usually be cultivating a new post throughout the month, but I’ve had to get them out in the last week or so, just having so little time and energy to dedicate to it. The trials and tribulations of life are many, and sometimes all we can do is persevere until things change.
I’d like to think I’m in a place where I can start dedicating more time to my projects now. Things feel settled. Maybe not completely, but at least enough for me to have more time to myself. Both physically and mentally, I believe I’ll have more capacity now to create, more capacity to do the things I love most.
Of course, I don’t want to make any promises, put any pressure on myself where there doesn’t need to be any. There are times when you do need to put yourself under some pressure so that things get finished. But give yourself too much and you weigh yourself down too heavily. That’s when guilt comes in, and if you start to associate creating with guilt, that can affect your relationship with it entirely, and that’s the last thing you want.
When things go slowly, you just have to go with it. Too much force, and things could break. It might be frustrating when the world is making you go slowly, when you’ve not made that active decision to slow it all down, but you can’t put too much pressure on yourself, because that will just make things even more frustrating, which will end up making you feel even worse. Sometimes, you have to simply accept where your mind is, and go with it, have faith that things will change. The change might not be in the foreseeable future, but change always comes, that is a guarantee.
My hopes are that things will pick up over the next couple of months for me, that things will settle and writing can become a part of my routine again. Even if I don’t make as much progress as I would like, I’ll remain positive about whatever I can get done, because that will always be important.
Wherever you’re at, be that in a slow rut or in the best creative place of your life, find that positivity wherever you can. If it’s easy for you to be positive because things are going really well, that’s amazing. If you’re finding it a little more difficult, that’s totally understandable. It’s not always easy to be positive, especially when you’re not making the progress you hoped you would. But don’t feel guilty, because I think guilt is such a hindrance to your creativity. We want to build ourselves up, not tear ourselves down, and I think that’s most important when we’re not creating the way we hoped; that’s where we have to be the most positive about ourselves, when it’s hardest.
So stay positive, and keep that guilt at bay, because that’s how we move forward even when things are slow.
Robyn x
R. A. Howard 