Not Exactly a New Year Resolution.... But a Start

I'm not one to declare New Year resolutions, however, I think if I write my goals for 2008 publicly, it will encourage me to look at what I have done and what I need to do. I am one to beat myself up about what I did not do and what I should have accomplished by now. But it is a new year and no more shouldas, couldas, wouldas. I placed in a short fiction contest in summer of '06 and then I seem to have languised since then. I still have a glob of a novel that is seriously in need of revising big time and just have not touched it in almost a year. BUT it is not like I haven't been writing. I have been writing my family history with my genealogy writing group and expect to have a couple of those stories published in a family journal. And a publisher of local and family histories is interested in my writing about the area in Arkansas where my mom was born and raised. I also have had scholarly/academic work published in the last year in a Greenwwod Press encyclopedia and am in the process of writing a big piece for a peer review journal on romance writers that I feel strongly about.

Knowing I needed a jumpstart on getting back to my fiction, I attended a one day "Crazy Child Writing" workshop one Saturday in early December. I wrote twenty-five pages in long hand on a new novel that I am excited about. But I am about to set my goals and one of them is to attend a revision workshop and or make the sacrifice and get a writing coach/developmental coach to get my first novel finished because the second one is really grabbing me. My problem is discipline and sticking to one thing and I need to correct that. Unfortunately I cannot chew gum and walk at the same time. LOL.

In the last six months several women have come into my life who have expressed a need to write or restart writing and I think I have the makings of a group of sisters where we can meet monthly or whenever and write freely and safely and who knows what can happen. So that is a goal. I have a few more days before I go back to work and I am taking myself on a little mini-retreat, checking into a nice hotel about 30 miles away while the storm comes into night and raining the next few days. I will be transferring my new storyline from paper to my new laptop and mapping out my 2008 writing goals. Whew, that felt good just getting this out.