Note: I intended to post this on Tuesday but just didn't have the time.
Last night it snowed. It was my perfect snow. I wait all winter, sometimes fruitlessly, for a snow like this.
It was the kind with the big fat blobby flakes, the one that look like mistakes from the snowflake factory. As if a few got stuck together on the assembly line and are just getting thrown out anyway, tossed overboard from the special effects catwalk in the sky no matter if they look like gobs of cotton. And they were in no hurry as they fell, floating down steadily, in that way where if you look up at the dark-gray sky, you can freeze-frame a whole segment of the drifting wads, and then look past those and find another frameful, and then beyond that one. Like the 360-degree camera introduced so dramatically in The Matrix, suddenly to life in snow.
I loathe winter. I hate being cold with something of a pathology. I abhor the whole season with an intensity I'm told is rather unmatched. I always feel such joy when the time comes to stop lumbering around with my heavy coat and garments, to let my skin breathe the free air again, to taste the sun on my collarbones. And the opposite thing, when it's time to protect that skin from the knifing cold, oh. Each year the hopeless feeling builds on last year's, a modest skyscraper of negativity at this point.
But I don't mind snow. I read once about how snow is created, the conditions that have to be present in the atmosphere for snow to form and fall, and I was kind of astonished that it ever happened at all. Because of that, it feels a little like a miracle to me.
I sometimes wish that we could have snow without winter, that we could have cool dry snow that fell and evaporated on streets warmed by summer sun. Or snow like ash, built up and swept away into nothing. I had this thought as I was driving home through the three-dimensional weather, sweeping cotton from my windshield, and I remembered the Uglies series of teen novels by a writer named Scott Westerfeld. It's set in the not-too-distant future, where everybody living in the central cities is subject to an operation upon reaching age 16, which renders them beautiful to a very specific standard. The beauty standard was scientifically determined, as I recall, to be as attractive to human eyes as possible. These superhuman beauties ("pretties") don't look much like our standard of beauty now, but more like baby animals.
If you're surprised when I tell you there's a dark side to this operation, you have never read a science fiction book before. There are multiple thought-provoking things about the series, and one of them is the very simple idea, seemingly impossible for humans to grasp on a cosmic level, that you can't have everything. A procedure that appears to put everyone on a level playing field in terms of appearance is going to have some serious drawbacks. As Eloi, you can play all day, but you're going to get eaten at night. An iPhone is going to have an expensive monthly service charge. It's just the way of things.
If I want my perfect snow, I have to live with the cold. Even Calvin accepts that.
My delight with last night's snow meant that I could ignore the cold, a little bit. Living in Maryland, I have the luxury to see snow less as a harbinger of death and mayhem than as a landscape enhancement. And certainly last night that's what it was. It was a marvel. I drove home wondering at it, watching it.
When I woke up this morning, it was all gone. There were white edgings on some of the roofs, but the frosting on the trees, the blanket on the ground, the mufflement of traffic and the inimitable cool stillness in the air--nothing remained.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Mining Whilst Tipsy
Matt is rather drunkily slaughtering orks in the computer room. I'm rather drunkily sitting in front of my computer out here. In theory I ought to be plunking down more words in the novel, but I'm not really feelin' it. I'm in a fainting-couch mood, instead. This is a mood where I go into the computer room, plunk down in the empty laundry basket, and give deep sighs until Matt asks me what's wrong. Then I draw a dramatic hand across my forehead, lean back, and tell him that writing is soooo hard. Then we both laugh.
I'm in a good place on the novel, really. Things are going well. I'm on track to be finished well before my deadline if I don't lose momentum. There are mechanical problems, but they're fixable. My writing is actually smoother and more creative in its smallities than on the previous project; I'm prouder of it on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I'm not positive it adds up to anything, but I think one day it will. I'm also grateful that I have the version of Microsoft Word which shows me, in the bottom bar, how many words are in my document. It's incredibly helpful to see that total and know I'm nowhere near the end of the story. But it also shows me that I'm nowhere near the end of the story. Gaaaah.
Sugar has this to say about writing:
No one is doing this for me right now, although the alcohol seeping into my brain cells (while it's removing some of them--woops, there goes what I knew about Kierkegaard) is certainly clawing away at the maudlin-ness. See, maybe there's the secret to coal mining. Get good and lubed up before you go down in the pit. Wait, no, that's a bad idea. I think I'm just about ready to get back to digging myself, seeing as how what I'm doing isn't actually life-threatening and I need to ride this buzz before it vanishes.
But first! In other news, I'm rereading Rebecca for the zillionth time. The most recent time I read it was in college, though, and at 30 it's quite a different experience. It turns out that I remember the mood, tone, events, and characters of the book far better than I remember the actual page-by-page experience of reading it. I've always said that it's the book I'd be if Fahrenheit 451 became reality. I still hold to that, as it's just essential reading, but I'm kind of turned off by how much more rhapsodically descriptive it is than I remembered, how much less it is about Big Things and how much more it is about small things. And how much more informed by patriarchy it is than I remembered. Thanks a lot, Mount Holyoke, now I'll permanently notice crap like that. Next on the list is David Foster Wallace, whom I've never read before aside from a short story or two which I didn't much enjoy. We'll see how Infinite Jest strikes me. I'm 1 for 2 on Thomas Pynchon.
I'm in a good place on the novel, really. Things are going well. I'm on track to be finished well before my deadline if I don't lose momentum. There are mechanical problems, but they're fixable. My writing is actually smoother and more creative in its smallities than on the previous project; I'm prouder of it on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I'm not positive it adds up to anything, but I think one day it will. I'm also grateful that I have the version of Microsoft Word which shows me, in the bottom bar, how many words are in my document. It's incredibly helpful to see that total and know I'm nowhere near the end of the story. But it also shows me that I'm nowhere near the end of the story. Gaaaah.
Sugar has this to say about writing:
Writing is hard for every last one of us... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.It's a quote I relied upon completely when I discovered it back in the fall, and I would not, not, not have completed the Greenland book without it. But the day-to-day experience of writing a novel is indeed not at all unlike mining. It's dirty and unpleasant and hard and from inside the mine, it doesn't look like you've made any kind of progress. For the moment, I just want to curl up in a ball and have someone pet me and say yes, dear, it surely is hard. Poor coal-mining baby.
No one is doing this for me right now, although the alcohol seeping into my brain cells (while it's removing some of them--woops, there goes what I knew about Kierkegaard) is certainly clawing away at the maudlin-ness. See, maybe there's the secret to coal mining. Get good and lubed up before you go down in the pit. Wait, no, that's a bad idea. I think I'm just about ready to get back to digging myself, seeing as how what I'm doing isn't actually life-threatening and I need to ride this buzz before it vanishes.
But first! In other news, I'm rereading Rebecca for the zillionth time. The most recent time I read it was in college, though, and at 30 it's quite a different experience. It turns out that I remember the mood, tone, events, and characters of the book far better than I remember the actual page-by-page experience of reading it. I've always said that it's the book I'd be if Fahrenheit 451 became reality. I still hold to that, as it's just essential reading, but I'm kind of turned off by how much more rhapsodically descriptive it is than I remembered, how much less it is about Big Things and how much more it is about small things. And how much more informed by patriarchy it is than I remembered. Thanks a lot, Mount Holyoke, now I'll permanently notice crap like that. Next on the list is David Foster Wallace, whom I've never read before aside from a short story or two which I didn't much enjoy. We'll see how Infinite Jest strikes me. I'm 1 for 2 on Thomas Pynchon.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Workspace Update
Thanks to Matt, I'm now thoroughly equipped to stare at pretty pictures while I work.
Lil' Tom Servo and bobble-head Vault Boy are there to cheer me on. Matt points out that everyone needs a yes-man and a contrarian, and he's absolutely right. And now I have everything I could need. Except, at the moment, time to work.
Lil' Tom Servo and bobble-head Vault Boy are there to cheer me on. Matt points out that everyone needs a yes-man and a contrarian, and he's absolutely right. And now I have everything I could need. Except, at the moment, time to work.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Vacant Stare Is How You Know I'm Working
I downloaded a desktop theme called "Nordic Scenes" a few days ago. Before that, rotating NASA spacescapes graced my desktop (say that three times fast), and although they made me and my human life feel distinctly big and significant, I was ready for a change. I had previously thought about getting some glacier-themed stuff to look at while I was writing the Greenland book, but I am so allergic to cold and cold environs that I thought it would just make me unhappy, rather than making me more in tune with what I was writing. I'm really glad I caved; these pictures are gorgeous, and although ice or mountains are often a theme, they aren't always.
I just wish I knew where the heck they'd taken the pictures. I mean, duh, in Nordic areas, just--is this Iceland? Norway? Greenland itself? I have no idea.
About half the time that I'm writing, I'm actually staring off into space above my laptop, because I'm thinking as I'm putting words down, and thanks to seventh grade typing class, I don't need to look at my fingers. I kind of wish I could be looking at something other than either the closed blinds or the inside of our patio, where the weedy pots sit forlornly on the concrete, helpfully reminding me that no plant will ever, ever flourish under my care, ever, unless I give up and leave it to its own devices (this is how the rosemary on our front walk survives). Not so helpful to my confidence, as a writer, a member of the supposedly more nurturing gender, or a human being. I mean, really. Who can't grow zucchini?
Where was I? Oh, yes, my view. I told Matt what I really wanted was a large screen, monitor-sized, that had beautiful rotating pictures on it for me to gaze at blankly while I typed, or while I sat like a stump and waited to know what to type. Pictures rather like the pretty themes you can download for Windows 7, actually. I don't want to pay for one of those digital picture frames, because I'm not really a picture person. I just want a kind of meditation screen.
We have a small old monitor in our garage that I tried and failed to sell on Craiglist once, and I'm giving some thought to hooking that guy up and leaving my lovely rotating Nordic desktop on it to look at. But since I'm working at the dining room table now, if we ever decide to eat a meal on this table again there'll be a whole setup to clear away instead of just this laptop. I don't want to be a pain, nor do I want things to be unnecessarily complicated.
When I was working on the yoga memoir I now have in the metaphorical trunk, I wrote about how people often reject props because they see them as being for beginners, or for wimps. I wrote something about how if you think of yourself as a hardcore practitioner, your attitude is, sheeit, I can do yoga on a concrete floor in India, man, I don't need no stinkin' props. Well, okay, if you insist, but it's not necessary to do that to do "real" yoga. And it's more pleasant to use props if they're available, anyway. It's nicer to practice on a Manduka mat in non-chafey pants if you can, even if your practice is mobile and advanced enough to be anywhere and in anything. Using a block makes life easier in half-moon, and boy, does practicing in Lululemon feel like a million bucks.
I could probably write in a heatless, windowless garret if I had to. Longhand, God help me. But I like writing in a padded chair, on a speedy little laptop, and I like having something pretty to look at while I'm working. So I think I'm going to try out that monitor setup after all, no matter if it makes my writing rig seem unreasonably elaborate. It may not make my writing any better to have something to look at, but it'll make me feel better.
Even with the equipment I have now, I did get past my block this week. Thanks in part to the judicious and responsible application of alcohol, I got to work. I wrote several thousand words this week, and I have a good idea for where to go next. It's not a project that has a picture-ready theme like the Greenland book, so I think I'll stick with Nordic scenes for now, but we'll see. My stamina bar is filling up again, and I have confidence that I'll finish this project, if for no other reason than I really want to work on the next one. For that next one, I know exactly what kind of slideshow I'll use: pictures of Marilyn Monroe.
I just wish I knew where the heck they'd taken the pictures. I mean, duh, in Nordic areas, just--is this Iceland? Norway? Greenland itself? I have no idea.
About half the time that I'm writing, I'm actually staring off into space above my laptop, because I'm thinking as I'm putting words down, and thanks to seventh grade typing class, I don't need to look at my fingers. I kind of wish I could be looking at something other than either the closed blinds or the inside of our patio, where the weedy pots sit forlornly on the concrete, helpfully reminding me that no plant will ever, ever flourish under my care, ever, unless I give up and leave it to its own devices (this is how the rosemary on our front walk survives). Not so helpful to my confidence, as a writer, a member of the supposedly more nurturing gender, or a human being. I mean, really. Who can't grow zucchini?
Where was I? Oh, yes, my view. I told Matt what I really wanted was a large screen, monitor-sized, that had beautiful rotating pictures on it for me to gaze at blankly while I typed, or while I sat like a stump and waited to know what to type. Pictures rather like the pretty themes you can download for Windows 7, actually. I don't want to pay for one of those digital picture frames, because I'm not really a picture person. I just want a kind of meditation screen.
We have a small old monitor in our garage that I tried and failed to sell on Craiglist once, and I'm giving some thought to hooking that guy up and leaving my lovely rotating Nordic desktop on it to look at. But since I'm working at the dining room table now, if we ever decide to eat a meal on this table again there'll be a whole setup to clear away instead of just this laptop. I don't want to be a pain, nor do I want things to be unnecessarily complicated.
When I was working on the yoga memoir I now have in the metaphorical trunk, I wrote about how people often reject props because they see them as being for beginners, or for wimps. I wrote something about how if you think of yourself as a hardcore practitioner, your attitude is, sheeit, I can do yoga on a concrete floor in India, man, I don't need no stinkin' props. Well, okay, if you insist, but it's not necessary to do that to do "real" yoga. And it's more pleasant to use props if they're available, anyway. It's nicer to practice on a Manduka mat in non-chafey pants if you can, even if your practice is mobile and advanced enough to be anywhere and in anything. Using a block makes life easier in half-moon, and boy, does practicing in Lululemon feel like a million bucks.
I could probably write in a heatless, windowless garret if I had to. Longhand, God help me. But I like writing in a padded chair, on a speedy little laptop, and I like having something pretty to look at while I'm working. So I think I'm going to try out that monitor setup after all, no matter if it makes my writing rig seem unreasonably elaborate. It may not make my writing any better to have something to look at, but it'll make me feel better.
Even with the equipment I have now, I did get past my block this week. Thanks in part to the judicious and responsible application of alcohol, I got to work. I wrote several thousand words this week, and I have a good idea for where to go next. It's not a project that has a picture-ready theme like the Greenland book, so I think I'll stick with Nordic scenes for now, but we'll see. My stamina bar is filling up again, and I have confidence that I'll finish this project, if for no other reason than I really want to work on the next one. For that next one, I know exactly what kind of slideshow I'll use: pictures of Marilyn Monroe.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Stolen Because I Love It
I read this on the Trenches webcomic website, and it's such a simple and excellent story that I just had to share it with you.
We used to have someone who would buy cans of Coke bulk and keep them in the fridge, selling them and donating the proceeds to charity. It relied on the honor system to leave money for them, but over time, the money wasn’t matching the missing cans…by a significant margin.
People started to get into heated arguments about it, with accusations flying left and right and emails questioning “What kind of people work here?!”
Finally, after much discussion, a webcam was set up to keep an eye on it. Many thought it signaled the end of our company culture and an absolute loss of faith in who we thought were our friends and coworkers.
The next day we fired the cleaners for stealing the money and drinking the Coke.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
It's Great, Really, But How About an Honorable Cash Prize?
Just before the New Year I got an e-mail from Writer's Digest, advising me that my work warranted an Honorable Mention in a recent horror contest. The May/June issue of WD will list my name as honorably mentioned in the contest, and I get a free copy of the 2012 Writer's Market. Which is nice, and the cost of the book means I'm ahead about $10 above my entry fee. Yay!
The story in question is "Gone to Earth", the title of which I blatantly stole from an early-20th-century book by a female author named Mary Webb. A sample (of my story, not hers):
As I said a while back (while I was agonizedly editing "Gone to Earth" down for this very contest, in fact), I don't really know what's up with contests, how they work, but thus far this is the third one in which I have been granted an honorable mention. I'm pleased that I warrant mention, especially of the honorable sort, but I'm kind of starting to wonder what's up with this. (I'm an Honorable Mention winner from way back, all the way to science fair projects in elementary school and whatnot.) What do I do to break through from "yeah, we liked it" to "this is outstanding by any measure"? More characterization? Fewer adjectives? Thicker paper?
In other news, I bought Florence + the Machine's new album (Lungs has been listened to a nub, or would have been, if it hadn't been listened to entirely in digital form), and have discovered that noise-canceling headphones are really the only way to listen to Florence + the Machine. I just want to lie down and let her voice soak into my body, maybe for a day or two straight.
Also, totally blocked from working on the horror novel, either through laziness or perfectionist fears or whatever else is making me chemically unable to put one word in front of the other. I think this evening I'll try lubing up with a cocktail and see where that gets me. Yeah, not a wise habit, but it worked nicely with the Greenland book, and I didn't wind up with an alcohol problem after it was all over, so I think I'm OK. Also also, someone with more talent in the tip of her nose than I have in my entire brain has just e-mailed me a WIP for me to read and chat with her about, so I am apparently being revenged for my impatience with my readers. I can't wait to dig in.
The story in question is "Gone to Earth", the title of which I blatantly stole from an early-20th-century book by a female author named Mary Webb. A sample (of my story, not hers):
The silence maddened her for the first week, but one day she shut her eyes and sat on the porch and listened, and she heard it finally: the whistling sounds of the trees, the industry of squirrels, the chittering of nesting birds, faraway burbling water. The clamor was deafening if you listened. The expectation of television, of booming car stereos, of next-door Smiths embroiled in domestic battle, had drowned out the real sounds that existed in this place. She was suddenly dizzy with the altitude.I wrote the story a few years ago, and although it really does belong in the stable of genre work, not literary, it was still (at the time) the closest I'd ever come to writing exactly what I had in mind. A piece of work I'm proud of. One day I want to place it in Weird Tales - it was rejected two years ago, but maybe with some more work it'll be worthy.
Two weeks later, and she is knitting her fingers into the tiny garden’s wet dirt. A woodpecker is sporadic in keeping her company as she kneels in the damp earth. She hums Springsteen. A pale green tendril from a bush nearby snakes its way around her moving wrist.
She ceases and looks at it. It is still for a moment, and then it moves again, climbing its way up her arm to the crease of her elbow. She stands up at speed and the tendril slips away harmlessly, lying on the ground.
Shelly is shaking, her eyes wide, the tune in her throat forgotten. Her earthen hands dangle. The tendril does not move. It is another three days before she goes to the garden again, and by then the seeds and weeds alike have uncurled into life, the weeds twice as large and throttling the squash.
As I said a while back (while I was agonizedly editing "Gone to Earth" down for this very contest, in fact), I don't really know what's up with contests, how they work, but thus far this is the third one in which I have been granted an honorable mention. I'm pleased that I warrant mention, especially of the honorable sort, but I'm kind of starting to wonder what's up with this. (I'm an Honorable Mention winner from way back, all the way to science fair projects in elementary school and whatnot.) What do I do to break through from "yeah, we liked it" to "this is outstanding by any measure"? More characterization? Fewer adjectives? Thicker paper?
In other news, I bought Florence + the Machine's new album (Lungs has been listened to a nub, or would have been, if it hadn't been listened to entirely in digital form), and have discovered that noise-canceling headphones are really the only way to listen to Florence + the Machine. I just want to lie down and let her voice soak into my body, maybe for a day or two straight.
Also, totally blocked from working on the horror novel, either through laziness or perfectionist fears or whatever else is making me chemically unable to put one word in front of the other. I think this evening I'll try lubing up with a cocktail and see where that gets me. Yeah, not a wise habit, but it worked nicely with the Greenland book, and I didn't wind up with an alcohol problem after it was all over, so I think I'm OK. Also also, someone with more talent in the tip of her nose than I have in my entire brain has just e-mailed me a WIP for me to read and chat with her about, so I am apparently being revenged for my impatience with my readers. I can't wait to dig in.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Resolute, 2011 Edition
Happy New Year!
At my former, anonymous blog, I got into the tradition of posting last year's New Year's resolutions and their result, and then making new ones in the same post. It was a useful tool to gauge how my year went, so I see no reason to stop it. Here are last year's:
1. Don’t lose sight of my health. Although in practical terms I flossed a lot less than I should have, and December of 2011 will always be remembered by me as the Month of Neverending Desserts, I still think I succeeded at this in a way I couldn't have known about when I made the resolution. My digestive health was becoming rather seriously bad in the months before I quit full-time work, and now I'm healthy again for the most part.
2. Remember the Bikram lesson. This lesson is sort of a long story, but the short version is that there is just no quick fix for my life. It doesn’t benefit me to run full speed into a perceived solution, because generally that solution ends up feeling an awful lot like a wall. I think I succeeded at remembering this. Kind of. I still want a single solution to drop into my life - the lottery, a fat book advance, a penalty-free writedown of our mortgage, etc. I haven't gotten much better at not hoping for such things, even though I learned a lot this year about how patience and inching toward my goals really does benefit me.
3. Stop worrying about “normal”. ENTIRELY. A wise person explained to me in 2010 that as long as your behavior doesn’t do anyone any harm, there is no reason to compare it to others’ and feel bad that it’s not the same. I made a lot of progress in this direction this year, but I still worry that I'm not...I don't know...keeping up? In certain ways? My house isn't as clean as the neighbors', I don't have as strong and solid of a life plan as my classmates'. Stuff like that. Whether the way I behave is normal or not, I care a lot less about that now, so I guess that's success.
4. Reeeeeead mooooooore boooooooooooooks. Yeah, I did. A lot more. Yay me.
5. Be better about my budget. Success. I'm a good deal more circumspect than I was in 2010, and not artificially via guilt. Which is great.
6. Relax about turning 30. I failed at this in terms of a resolution, as I was not at all relaxed over the course of the year (or on the actual birthday) about turning 30. But I turned 30 and the world didn't end. It's much nicer to be 30 than it was to be 23, I'll say that much. But in terms of not being worried about aging, that's a big FAIL FAIL FAIL.
7. Find a direction. Success. I want to be a novelist. Time will tell if it's a direction that works.
This was a much better year for resolutions than most of them have been. [pats self on back] And this year's resolutions:
1. Slim down in terms of possessions. It's not necessary for me to own the equivalent of a video store, for example, or a whole stable of items that I might find a use for someday. I need to be still more ruthless about getting rid of things. I'm a recovering pack-rat (which is rather like being a recovering alcoholic - you're never really cured), and there is lots more to do.
2. With my newfound financial circumspection, toss more money into my debts. This is actually a specific thing I need to do, not just a "pay off debt" resolution. It's hard to explain practically, but it's a pretty simple financial-habits issue.
3. In terms of writing, put into practice all the things that have worked for me in 2011. Specifically: 1) Keep blogging. It helps me find my voice. 2) Just Do It. Put words on the page; it all comes from there. 3) Set a time-limit goal and stick to it. For example, my absolute deadline for the horror novel is June (failing some kind of insane life circumstance). I will be done with a first draft by June, or I'm fired.
4. Be fearless. Prior years' resolutions were about getting rid of guilt or embarrassment, or about decreasing fear to sustainable levels. This year I'm going for broke: fearlessness. About my writing, about my teaching, about being around other human beings, about going confidently in whatever direction my life wants to take me.
5. Detach. Stop fretting over the outcome and how it affects you and whether what happened reflects badly on you. Just live and do your best.
I think I had some more small ones floating around in my mind, but after 24 hours of trying to remember them, I can't. Maybe I'll update later, or maybe I'll just try to do these five as best I can.
I hope wherever and whoever you are, 2012 is your year.
At my former, anonymous blog, I got into the tradition of posting last year's New Year's resolutions and their result, and then making new ones in the same post. It was a useful tool to gauge how my year went, so I see no reason to stop it. Here are last year's:
1. Don’t lose sight of my health. Although in practical terms I flossed a lot less than I should have, and December of 2011 will always be remembered by me as the Month of Neverending Desserts, I still think I succeeded at this in a way I couldn't have known about when I made the resolution. My digestive health was becoming rather seriously bad in the months before I quit full-time work, and now I'm healthy again for the most part.
2. Remember the Bikram lesson. This lesson is sort of a long story, but the short version is that there is just no quick fix for my life. It doesn’t benefit me to run full speed into a perceived solution, because generally that solution ends up feeling an awful lot like a wall. I think I succeeded at remembering this. Kind of. I still want a single solution to drop into my life - the lottery, a fat book advance, a penalty-free writedown of our mortgage, etc. I haven't gotten much better at not hoping for such things, even though I learned a lot this year about how patience and inching toward my goals really does benefit me.
3. Stop worrying about “normal”. ENTIRELY. A wise person explained to me in 2010 that as long as your behavior doesn’t do anyone any harm, there is no reason to compare it to others’ and feel bad that it’s not the same. I made a lot of progress in this direction this year, but I still worry that I'm not...I don't know...keeping up? In certain ways? My house isn't as clean as the neighbors', I don't have as strong and solid of a life plan as my classmates'. Stuff like that. Whether the way I behave is normal or not, I care a lot less about that now, so I guess that's success.
4. Reeeeeead mooooooore boooooooooooooks. Yeah, I did. A lot more. Yay me.
5. Be better about my budget. Success. I'm a good deal more circumspect than I was in 2010, and not artificially via guilt. Which is great.
6. Relax about turning 30. I failed at this in terms of a resolution, as I was not at all relaxed over the course of the year (or on the actual birthday) about turning 30. But I turned 30 and the world didn't end. It's much nicer to be 30 than it was to be 23, I'll say that much. But in terms of not being worried about aging, that's a big FAIL FAIL FAIL.
7. Find a direction. Success. I want to be a novelist. Time will tell if it's a direction that works.
This was a much better year for resolutions than most of them have been. [pats self on back] And this year's resolutions:
1. Slim down in terms of possessions. It's not necessary for me to own the equivalent of a video store, for example, or a whole stable of items that I might find a use for someday. I need to be still more ruthless about getting rid of things. I'm a recovering pack-rat (which is rather like being a recovering alcoholic - you're never really cured), and there is lots more to do.
2. With my newfound financial circumspection, toss more money into my debts. This is actually a specific thing I need to do, not just a "pay off debt" resolution. It's hard to explain practically, but it's a pretty simple financial-habits issue.
3. In terms of writing, put into practice all the things that have worked for me in 2011. Specifically: 1) Keep blogging. It helps me find my voice. 2) Just Do It. Put words on the page; it all comes from there. 3) Set a time-limit goal and stick to it. For example, my absolute deadline for the horror novel is June (failing some kind of insane life circumstance). I will be done with a first draft by June, or I'm fired.
4. Be fearless. Prior years' resolutions were about getting rid of guilt or embarrassment, or about decreasing fear to sustainable levels. This year I'm going for broke: fearlessness. About my writing, about my teaching, about being around other human beings, about going confidently in whatever direction my life wants to take me.
5. Detach. Stop fretting over the outcome and how it affects you and whether what happened reflects badly on you. Just live and do your best.
I think I had some more small ones floating around in my mind, but after 24 hours of trying to remember them, I can't. Maybe I'll update later, or maybe I'll just try to do these five as best I can.
I hope wherever and whoever you are, 2012 is your year.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)