The first week of 2025 has been…okay. I planned out some writing projects for the first few months of the year, but so far I haven’t had a chance to write. Work, ConFusion 2025 prep, and general burnout are using up all of my time and energy right now. Thus the meandering tone of this month’s IWSG update.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for January 2025 is: Describe someone you admired when you were a child. Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?

I have been pondering this for a while. From the vantage point of my mid-fifties, looking back, I don’t remember really admiring anyone. As a child I loved my family, of course, and thought various people were “cool”, but isolated on that small farm and attending that small school in that small town, I don’t think I found anyone to admire simply because I had no context for what was “admirable.” I don’t think I would have even known what that word meant.

So forty years on, I can look back on the people from my childhood and say “this person was a good person, and worthy of respect.” Famous real people, living or dead, came to us filtered through the TV or radio, and so politicians and war heroes were no more tangible than super heroes or the characters in, say, Miami Vice. General Patton, John Rambo, and Captain America occupied the same ontological space. What does “not real” mean to a sleep-deprived 13-year-old who is milking cows at 6 am the morning after watching Return of the Jedi?

So as a child, the people I looked up to or wanted to emulate, however briefly, were characters from movies or TV or books.  Real people were just too…real.

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