Resolute

I’m sure I said last year that I wasn’t going to do a resolutions or year in review post, and then I did one anyway. So this time I’m doing it without apology, a bit later than everyone else. It would be dull if we were all the same.

Every year, instead of making new year’s resolutions, my other half and I do life goals for the year instead. This sounds a bit new age but the idea is that these are something to work towards, not the ‘one shot and you’re out’, give-up type of resolution.

Here are last year’s, in no particular order (you can read my 2015 resolutions post here):

1. Edit the book I have in draft
2. Run regularly and lose weight
3. Make more time for family as well as writing

Editing the book has progressed in fits and starts. It’s been picked up and put down more times than I can remember. The question is, why is it taking so long? I’ve been going through it chapter by chapter, sometimes rewriting big sections based on what I know now about the story and the characters. Yet it isn’t finished, and having stepped away from it for a bit I think I can see why. It started out as a self-contained thing, an expansion of a short story I wrote that kept getting longer, but as I wrote it it grew. I have a nasty suspicion that it’s bigger than one book, and that until I know more about what happens later, I won’t be confident enough of the ending of this book to get it finished to my satisfaction. And there are other things I want to do first (see below).

I haven’t done very well with running either (and don’t ask me about the scales, it’s just after Christmas). So this year I WILL be picking it up again, and trying to get back to a regular parkrun habit. Apart from anything else, I miss all the cake.

The thing I have done is make time. 2015 was a strange year in that I left my job in July and took time out. I know how lucky I am to be able to do that, thanks to a very supportive husband and my savings account. I’m less stressed and much happier now, but also conscious that I need to earn a living beyond irregular payments for freelance work and stories. Plus I’ve spent a lot of time ‘just writing’, to the point where I have another novel and a book of linked short stories in draft, and am writing another short book at the moment (hence the radio silence on the blog lately).

So here are my life goals for this year:

• Get the work out there. I’m planning to self-publish the linked-short-stories book once I’ve licked it into shape. It’s intended as a fun, light read, so I intend to use it to try self-publishing and see how I like it. It will mean learning new skills, but I’m cool with that. This life goal also includes editing and querying for the stack of drafts I have sitting on the computer, and getting back into regular journal submissions, which is something that slipped in the later part of last year.
• Build my running habit back up and (yes) lose weight.
• Find work that’s compatible with writing. I need to find a balance between my previous full-time-work-and-stressful-commute-and-also-writing existence and my current writing-and-family existence.  Wish me luck!

Feel free to ask me how it’s going, nudge me, or buddy up if your goals are similar. And here’s to a wonderful 2016 for us all.

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The featured image is GOAL! by Thomas Leth-Olsen, which is shared under Creative Commons license 2.0. No changes were made.