First, let's check out last year's resolutions:
- Intentionally exercise at least three times a week.FAIL. A lot of fail. I managed it for, oh, a couple weeks. But then my dad came out for a visit, and that always throws my schedule off. And then it was summer, and hot. And then I went to visit my sister. And then my family came to stay with me. And then I wrote a novel in a month. And then my family came back again.
- Blog daily. FAIL. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It was a nice idea.
- Read lots, at least a book a week. YES! I'm not sure if I read a new book every single week, and I didn't actually document them very well, but I did read lots, sometimes three or more books in a week, so I think it all evened out.
And now for this year's resolutions:
- Finish all of the movies on my shelf before buying new ones. As of Jan 1, I had 24 unwatched movies. As of today, I'm down to 15.
- Finish an old project before starting a new one. I have 13 in-progress projects. Well, 12, now, because I finished one yesterday. And I'm close to finishing another tonight. If you want to see the whole extravaganza of procrastination shaming, you can visit my crafty Tumblr at daniemakesthings.tumblr.com
- Finish the unread books on my shelf. Current count, 67. Plus 2 in progress. Plus several ebooks on my phone, but I'm not counting those.
- Finish the first draft of Frenchie and start on edits.
- Get my office organized. With the visit from my niece, lots of stuff moved into the office in an effort to baby-proof the house. And then we moved rooms around so my new roommate could move in, and my craft room/spare room stuff had to relocate to my office, too. So I've got my desk, my five bookshelves, a recliner, two boxes of still-unpacked office stuff, four boxes of still-unpacked random crap, four big Rubbermaid bins of yarn, a big box of purses, and about a dozen bags of craft projects (or projects-to-be), plus a closet full of winter coats and costumes. This will be a long-term project.
It looks like this year is the year of finishing crap. That's not necessarily a bad thing, actually. I've got a bad habit of starting on new things before I finish stuff. (Could you tell?)
I'm pretty sure that I can make these resolutions this year. I feel as if I should have one or two that are more challenging, but in all honesty, finishing Frenchie and starting the edits is going to be rough. Once I realized that this story is actually one that I enjoy AND is commercially viable, it suddenly seemed scary. Up until this point, I've either not liked the end result of what I've written, or it didn't really fit into any particular genre and was therefore not really marketable, so there's been no pressure to do anything other than write it. But this one... once it's polished, I'm going to take a deep breath, write and polish a query letter, and start looking for an agent. That's big. (At least, it's big for me.)