Saturday, December 29, 2018

New Year's Writing Resolutions

New Year's Eve is one of my favorite holidays--there's something satisfying to me about closing the door on a year and looking forward to a new one. I love making New Year's resolutions. I am not great about keeping them after January, but I am great about not beating myself up about that fact.

This holiday season, however, has been exhausting. I've had strep throat and a sinus infection (not at the same time, thankfully), which didn't help. There were things going on at my kids' school and at church that I had to get through. One of my cousins got married in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I had some extra travel thrown in there. I saw a thread on Twitter about it being okay not to make resolutions for 2019 if you feel like just surviving is all you can do, and that really resonated with me. While I love the promise of a new year, and usually try to capitalize on that, I don't want making resolutions to feel like one more thing on an endless to-do list.

So we'll see how exhausted I feel on December 31st. Maybe I'll resolve to make improvements in my life. Maybe I'll resolve to be okay with just keeping my head above water. Whatever you may choose to do, I hope it brings you happiness and a sense of purpose.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Getting back into things

I quit NaNo because I got strep throat a few days before Thanksgiving. With family in town for the holiday on top of everything else, I just missed too many days to be able to make up the deficit. I was upset at first, because I didn't win last year, and really wanted a win this year to... I don't know, prove to myself that I was able to write a new book?

In the end, I decided I was okay with it, because I hadn't really wanted to start a new book in November. I wanted to work on the edits for the Ghost Girls book. So when I stopped writing for NaNo, I told myself I would work even harder on Ghost Girls.

And then I didn't. I gave myself permission to not write. I read a lot. I worked on Christmas stuff. But today I finally felt the itch to get back to it. And it was glorious. I hope the itch lasts. Because I really love this book.