I haven't had a real vacation in several years. I've taken a day off here or there for personal learning opportunities like podcasting conferences or the occasional sick days, but I haven't been able to fully disconnect in much longer than I'd like to admit. I've scheduled an entire week off in October, and I'm already starting to stress about it. We have someone new starting at work to help shoulder some of the load on October 7th, which means I'll have a mere 3 weeks to get her as fully spun up as I can before I'm gone for a week. Luckily, there are some other teammates available to help provide guidance in my absence, so everything should be covered. The goal is to not look at my email or internal messaging client a single time while I'm out (except I will check email once per day because I don't want to come back to 5 million emails in my inbox). But the thought of completely disconnecting for a week stresses me out. Why is that?

So it hasn't quite been 52 weeks, but we're closing in on it. I've been busy. Crazily busy. Of course, that's no excuse for failing to write, but luckily, I have been writing! I just haven't been posting it here. Last year, I wrote about how I'd lost confidence in my writing , and while I'm still getting some of that confidence back I've made some pretty fantastic progress. I've thrown myself into the world of audiofiction both as a writer and voice actor, and I'm pretty sure I've finally found my niche. I've always struggled with descriptive writing, and my dialogue has been my strong point for as long as I can remember. Normally, that would simply mean that I'd need to suck it up and practice writing descriptively to get better, but I found that practicing had little to no effect on the quality of my output. Every time I tried to describe a scene, I'd find that even I didn't know what it looked like. The only sort of d