New Year, New Me? (Nah)

archer-wiki_characters_archer-vice_skinny-pam_01Well, after my flurry of November activity/NaNoWriMo, I sure did taper off on blogging, didn’t I?

And since today’s New Year’s Day, it’s a perfect time to resolve to blog more in 2017!

Among other resolutions, of course. But don’t worry, no “new me” stuff — as Pam says, I really like me.

Last year I resolved to:

  • Stop drinking soda. I actually did really well on this one – I only broke it a handful of times over 365 days, and in the two situations when I had an actual Coke, it was because I was ill and needed it to settle my stomach (worked both times, and both times I felt AMAZING. Stupid terrible addictive Coke). I also had 3-4 Mountain Dew Baja Blast Freezes from Taco Bell, mostly because I was desperate for caffeine and short on time. I’m going to continue this into 2017. 
  • Go to church once a month. C wanted to “go to church more,” and I (being me) insisted that the goal should be specific, measurable, and time-based, which “more” isn’t. I accomplished this one pretty easily (there were one or two months where I ended up rushing on the last day of the month…) and will continue in 2017, hopefully getting to the point where Sarge will permit himself to be left in church daycare instead of throwing a terrible fit and demanding a parent stay with him outside the sanctuary. :/

Note that I only have two I can remember — the other ones were probably writing-related and I probably blew them terribly. I’ll have to go see if I can find evidence elsewhere.

New in 2017, I want to come up with some good ones! Like most people, I have general goals like “be healthier” / “lose weight” / “be more organized” but those aren’t SMART goals, so they don’t work for resolutions! Instead, I’m thinking…

  • Update my blog once twice a week. I really want to go with twice but I doubt myself. On the other hand, failing to reach a stretch goal is better than meeting an easy goal… right? If I meet my goal of once a week, I might only have 52 entries, and if I fail at twice a week I might have almost double that… depending on how often I fail, I guess. But I seemed to do well (well, I did OK) for NaNoWriMo. I think I’m going to shoot for Tuesdays and Saturdays being my regular update days. (I may give myself permission to just post “working on my WIP” in order to hit goal #2, though, which is…)
  • Write 10+ pages a month for my YASFWIP. Or, in other words, actually do what I’m supposed to be doing with my crit group. This will, of course, help me reach my larger goal of finishing a damn novel already, especially since this particular WIP is the one I won a grant to write in 2015. Whoops.

I don’t want to get too fancy or too long-winded; last year I was successful because I only had two goals (stop doing one thing, do another thing more) and they were both little things that contributed to bigger things (be healthier physically, be healthier emotionally). So, as much as I’d like to start adding things like

  • write two hours a day
  • do cardio 2x/week in addition to 2x/wk strength workouts
  • keep house clean/tidy
  • stop eating fast food
  • make your own damn coffee and stop going to Starbucks/10 Johnson
  • grade all papers within 48 hours and return to students asap
  • put away the laundry the same day you washhhhhhAHAHAHAHAHAH YEAH RIGHT

those are mostly things that involve a large time commitment and/or significant lifestyle change. So I’m going to keep working in that direction, but for now, just those two: blog more; write more.

Good resolutions for a wanna-be writer!

Anybody else got any good resolutions this year?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.