I don’t make New Years resolutions. This is not because I can’t keep them, but rather because I am an obsessive, goal-driven person who is always working toward too many goals at once. I can’t just interrupt all that to make new goals just because the year happens to change on me.
But if I had a resolution for this year, it would be to put writing first. Last year too many other things needed to come first. These were real needs–Drew had some big things he was working toward, and I had to fill in all the gaps. And then there was the moving and the buying the house, and the illness stuff. I wrote, but I didn’t write like I want to be writing.
It’s time to stop that. Writing is my actual job now, not my pretend job, which is how it often felt when I was investing in my career for all those years. It needs to get the priority an actual job would. I’m still not going to write eight hours a day (because my brain just can’t handle that) but I need to be writing a decent chunk every day. I’ve been working really hard, but not as steadily as I could be. This year, that’s changing. I’m anticipating some other big changes in our lives over the next few years, and if I don’t put writing front and center now, I’m setting myself up for some very big problems down the road.
Now, nothing is allowed to push my writing aside. I am not allowed to schedule so many things in a day that I have no brain space to write. If I have to do big things that will suck my brain out my ears, I have to write first, so it gets done.
In reality, this is only a small adjustment, as I already have decent writing habits. I just want to move those to the right a little, until they reach excellent writing habits. I started working on this goal a month or so ago, and it’s going very well. I’ve got several projects to work on for the first part of the year, and then after that, who knows.
