Well, here we are again – at year’s end, again. Another year, another Polyglot NaNoWriMo attempt, another failure. My choices now are either to be unmotivated and dismiss the whole lot as a bad dream, or keep a stiff upper lip and try to think of it from a different angle. If I try to put a positive spin on it, I’ve written more than I had written at the beginning of the month. I’ve got a solid foundation, I’ve got a cast of characters that I genuinely like, who I feel like I owe a story. So I’ll use what I’ve written so far as a learning tool before I start it again, and edit as I go. There, that’s awfully sunny-side-up of me, isn’t it?
As much as I’d love to blame my abject failure (where did that sunshine go all of a sudden?) on the inconsiderate arrival of the new Pokémon game (which just so happens to be one of the best in the series so far, if you ask me, which you didn’t) on the 18th of the month, the truth is, if you examine the facts – 
I actually fell off the rails a couple of days before that happened. I remember tweeting that I would write more than the word count goal each day to catch up, but that didn’t exactly happen. In fact, I never went back to the project again, as this illustration clearly shows. I fumbled it a bit from the very first day, though I did manage to get back on track for a couple of days. Still, 1,610 words is better than no words at all. And all in Welsh, which was entirely new for me – I usually chicken out and flip back to Swedish, where I’m much more comfortable. Even though I didn’t reach the goal, I’m pleased that I managed to get as far as I did in just Welsh.
So, what next, I hear you cry? Well, as much as I’d love to promise some grand project for the new year, I’ll probably just bumble along buggering it up like I usually do. The big change is that I’m going to finally make the jump from Goodreads to The Storygraph (oh, the graphs, the data!) from the first of January, so that’s quite exciting – I’ve been going through and cataloguing my books in preparation for the big move, and I’ve found some that have jumped up my ‘to read’ list, so that’s been nice.
As for language learning, well, I’m still in the process of digitising all of the disparate notes I had laying in notebooks all over the place – and having a visual record of all the languages I’ve dabbled in over the past couple of years has been… well, eye opening. Not necessarily in a bad way, but has helped me to notice that actually, I seem to have made it through quite a large chunk of the year without dropping either of my ‘Priority’ languages. Yes, of course I’ve switched between the two, focused on one more than the other, and then switched back at not-so-regular intervals. But they do seem to be the two that are sticking. Just don’t ask me to say anything in Korean, because honestly I’m not sure I could rustle up a sentence if you gave me a week and a dictionary. But even so! I’ll be taking Welsh and Korean with me into the new year.
Well, I think that pretty much wraps up this year. One thing I’d like to mention, is that… well, as much as I don’t want to dwell on the drawn-out demise (or seeming demise) of Twitter, I’ve actually semi-moved to Mastodon. For the moment I’ll be updating all three of the social media I’m on, so now there’s another place on the internet you can find me, should you want to keep up with my nonsense in a more-often-than-monthly manner, and of course you can still find me on Twitter and Instagram (I’m @sprakskatan on both, as always). I wish you all a very peaceful winter and festive period for those who celebrate, and a very happy New Year – and I’ll see you in January.
— J.
den språkliga skatan 