The new year always makes me feel like I have another chance to get it right this time. To recover the joy of creating and spill words onto the page like a pitcher I’ve tipped over. The trouble is that by February I’ve usually discovered that I’m still me, that the ways I can sabotage myself are legion, and the clouds overhead are equally thick inside my head. All the glitter of the new year has fallen away and I’m back to where I’ve always been.
This time I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of placing massive, impossible goals in my own path, I’ve decided I’m going to challenge myself to finish the last of last year’s projects. Things people have given up on ever seeing from me. I’m pretending this is still the end of 2025, and all the new ideas poking at the edges of my imagination are going to wait until I let the new year in. It’s not a brilliant strategy, but we’ll see if it works. If nothing else, I’ll have a few extra words or pages complete by the time February rolls around. Every extra word is a step in the right direction. I have a novella revision in the works, two novels to write (one much longer than the other, so it’ll probably go last), and a second-pass edit that really shouldn’t take me that long.
What have you got to finish? Tell me about it. Let’s commiserate.