New Year's Resolution Resolution

Here I sit on December 31 with my hands on my keyboard. This is usually where I sigh pitifully and pound out an email to my friends begging them to please hold me accountable for one or more of my ridiculous resolutions for the coming year. 

Over the years, I've declared them all. Get healthier. Practice music more. Clean out the closets. Read more. Read less. Read better. Keep my car clean. Change the sheets every single Sunday. Don't be late so much. Stop being afraid of snakes so I can sit through a movie without living in fear one will slither across the screen and terrify me into cardiac arrest. Laugh more. Cry less. Write the great American novel and retire to a deserted island where I will write anyway. Go to the gym, on purpose. Recycle. Reduce debt. Increase giving. Call old friends. Find new homes for some of my books. Adopt new books.

The list continues. It isn't a bad list, not really. They're all good things I could stand to do, but the problem with resolutions is that they are January's version of a Christmas tree--they stick around until all your friends start hauling their dried up, brown-edged resolutions out to the trash can with the stale sugar cookies, and you start thinking maybe yours are starting to look a little dried up and brown-edged, too. They're not reasonable. They're not a big deal. They're just something everyone says out loud because they mean well, not because they expect to still be thinking about them in the middle of September.

That's why this year's New Year's resolution is just that: resolution itself.

This year I am not going to make a list of wonderful new things I should start. Instead, I'm going to focus on wonderful old things I should finish.

I have known myself all my life (except a brief period when I was three and had my tonsils out. Apparently the anesthesia they gave me was good stuff). That is almost long enough for me to get a grip on my fatal flaw. Well, one of them. I'm eaten up with flaws, and probably more than a few are fatal. Either way, one of them is this: I am a non-finisher. I am a self-sabotager. I am a focus-loser.

I lack resolution.

No, it really doesn't.

I can get a grip on this tendency where it counts for most people. I follow through in my job. I'm there for other people when they need me, and I do what I will say I will do when it affects any other person but myself--at least, I always try and most of the time I manage it. 

But when it's myself? Yeah...there we have a problem.

This year, I say I owe it to myself to pick up those lose threads and start weaving them back together. I am going to pick up where I left off on resolutions past, and I'm going to resolve them. I am going to do what I meant to do, what I know I can do, and I'm going to stop letting life get in the way of Life.

I will finish off those half-written novels and stories, draw my drawings, craft my crafts, blog my blog, learn my lessons, and go the distance. It has been a long, strange journey and it is finally time I arrived at my destination.

Happy 2014, everyone!

Halloweenie and All Nano Eve

Halloween is here, and it's a pretty important day for a few reasons.

For one--let's be honest here--it's an excuse for candy. LOTS.

Even on good years my neighborhood doesn't have very many trick-or-treaters, but we always stock up. Always. This year the weather wasn't great so we didn't have any. At least, I'm pretty sure it was the weather. I don't think there's anything about my house that gives us away as greedy candy-hoarders, even if it is true. I was a little sad not to have some trick-or-treaters come by and be adorable on my doorstep, but then I ate some candy and got over it.

For our dog Bella, Halloween is a most important day. She is the only extrovert in our little family, and every year she sits with wagging tail, just overflowing with excitement to bark at the doorbell and lick the sugar off tiny, costumed hands. This year, they didn't come. She waited and waited, but this year she had to settle for some heavy sighs and consolation petting. At least she got to wear her little wiener-dog Halloween kerchief for a while.

Husband and I cuddled up on the couch next to her to watch our once-a-year Halloween movies, several of which include Tim Curry. At least there was candy.

Probably the most important part of Halloween for me is that Halloween is actually TWO holidays. It is like a holiday in COSTUME.

To a great deal of writerly folks, Halloween is ACTUALLY Nanowrimo Eve.

If you don't know what Nanowrimo is, go here.

I have attempted and completed the Nano challenge every year since 2007. I might have written 50,000 words of various novels in each of those years, but it was not easy. Not at ALL.

Most years, I have some idea of what I'm going to write. It might change along the way--okay, it will PROBABLY change--but I have some kind of clue. This year, I planned to write my first sequel to a previous Nano novel. Unfortunately, my October was so full of busy, I never got a plan together. That's another thing I've learned--you can fly by the seat of your pants through a lot of things, including novels, but not middle books of a three-part series. Those require brain cells and good notes. I have a few of the latter and not nearly enough of the former.

So, once again, I find myself sitting on my couch listening to the "Time Warp" blare from my television, and the only tools I have at my disposal to turn a bunch of words into some kind of art is a notebook and a pen.

It is a very good notebook and an excellent pen. I hope there are a lot of good words hovering around in one or both of them. Come midnight, we shall see.

At least there is candy.