Unus Annus UnUS ANNUS

Unus annus. One year. The low down, if you aren’t in the know, is a couple of YouTube personalities got together to make a video every day for one year, then at the end of the year, deleted the channel. Think of it as nothing lasts forever/live in the moment type of thing. 

I was super into it.

I didn’t come here to gush about the series itself (even though I watched it faithfully and pulled an all nighter after working a full shift to be there for when they pressed delete). Instead, I want to talk about what happened after the screen went black, and something that had been there for me every day was suddenly dead and gone forever.

You wouldn’t think that a show ending would evoke such emotion in me. I definitely didn’t think it would. But when you do something every day for a whole year, it becomes a part of you, whether you like it or not. 

Dude. I bawled. 

Alone in my living room. Bottle of wine in hand. Face in other hand. Bawling at a blank screen.

To be fair, it was a long day, and I had been awake for almost 24 hours, and I’m old and don’t handle no sleep as well as I used to. But that feeling of loss, of empty, remained with me through the night, up until the next day, then ebbing and flowing back and forth from there randomly over the next several days. It was like I lost a friend.

It sucked. But in a good way. Like the friend had some terrible disease that made them live through pain every single day, and their passing means no more pain. Make sense?

What I took away from Unus Annus was that you can do anything you want to. It just takes commitment and a whole lot of work. 

So, in true Manda fashion, I went to work on my planner. I made an actual business plan for the entirety of next year, and I’m going to do my very best to keep to my deadlines. So no more winging it. I want to have the final draft of Zemblanity completed and sent off to agents by February/March, and I want to have another short story written up and sent to magazines by the end of the year. I want to give essay writing an honest try, and plan to have two articles written over the course of the year. Textbroker will hopefully be a weekly thing (even though the pay isn’t the greatest), at least until I can get a handle on another route. And those occasional freelancing gigs I’ve done in the past? I plan on searching job sites once a month to see if there’s anything that would be a good fit for me.

Most of all, more than anything, is I want to stir the same feeling in others as Unus Annus stirred in me. I want to mean something to someone: if not me myself, then the words I write. I’ll admit that a lot of what I do here is word vomit with no real feeling behind it. It’s half assed is what it is. It’s book reviews and fiction—which, to be fair, is the majority of my life. The importance of all that, though, is lost in translation, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I haven’t been trying hard enough. Even this post could have some more to it, honestly. It feels generic. It feels like anyone could have written it. There is very little of myself in it, and those little glimpses come out in occasional curse words. That’s not enough.

What does this mean for you? Not a whole lot, probably. You will either notice a change over here or on one of my socials or the stories I write, or you won’t.

What does this mean for me? A whole lot of work. But if a couple of guys can throw their all into something that is just going to disappear, then I think I can manage to put in more effort to do something that’s been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember.

I want to write. I want people to care about what I write. I want to create characters from nothing and make them feel just as real as your family, your friend, your lover. I want you to feel that same stir of emotion and inspiration that I feel so often.

Enough talking. Lights. Camera. Action.