Required New Year Post

I hope everyone had a lovely evening welcoming in the new year. I spent it with friends (which is the best way to spend it--and I'm counting family as friends, since your family should be your friends).

The new year means resolutions, right? I like to aim for a whole bunch of resolutions in the hopes of hitting one or two :) And this year, instead of doing monthly resolutions, I'm going to aim for more general ones:

- Read ONE non-work book a month

This one should hopefully be easy, or at least not a stressor. I really just want to read more outside my genre so that I can get exposed to different writing and thoughts.

- Write 5,000 words a month

This might be tough, but it's a low enough number that I should be able to do it. I would like to put all these words toward one project and by the end of the year have a finished 60K novel, but...

Yeah.

- Focus more on the craft of writing

I don't just mean the craft of stringing words together. I feel like in my frenzy of writingwritingwriting, I've forgotten about things like plot and character development. Need to return to the livelihood of writing rather than the taskmaster I've made myself.

And yes, I see the irony that my previous goal is a word count. I don't think the act of writing should stop me from improving in other ways.

- Waste less time online

I waste tons of time online and it needs to stop. Tumblr is a big one, but it's also often my de-stressor, so I'm trying to tweak how I can keep a good balance here. This one is going to need to be a slow work in in progress, I know already :)

- Live my life honestly

This will be the toughest. Not that I live a lie currently, but I want to slowly start being able to be myself in all avenues of my life. Mostly in being openly genderqueer. Getting everyone to use "they" pronouns. I hate change and I hate changing how people view me, so this is a tough one. I'm going to need to be a lot braver than I generally feel I've been.

Along those lines I've also been thinking more about having certain surgeries, and while that's going to take A LOT of contemplation, it's something that's on my radar.

That's it!

Mostly. I do want to get into better shape, but I'm not making that a resolution, because...I'm pretty sure I'll fail to reach certain goals. But I do want to start afresh. Eat less crap, exercise a little more each day, that sort of thing. If anyone wants to be competitively fit with me, let me know :)

May your year get progressively more awesome!