Year of Awesome

The clock strikes midnight, and the revellers welcome in the new year. A few hours later (probably in the afternoon) the now-hungover revellers surface from sleep. It's January the First, and it's time to make your new year's resolutions. This year's going to be way more awesome than last year, right? You're going to do more, achieve more, not waste a single day. Well, maybe today, seeing as how it is already 4.30 in the afternoon. But starting tomorrow (well, maybe on the third – tomorrow is a public holiday in NZ after all) thing are Going. To. Get. Done.

At least, that's how it's supposed to do. I spent New Year's Eve having a lovely dinner out at some family friends' place, before racing home with the parentals to grab some whiskey and shortbread (family tradition) to see in the new year. We couldn't find a countdown on the television so we turned on National Radio, or Radio New Zealand as I think it's now called, and waited. New Year came, I drank my on glass of whiskey, induged in three pieces of shortbread, and went to bed. I didn't bother making any resolutions. They have a way of becoming momentously stupid, and people usually break at least one in the first week of January.

But I find myself now, on the ninth, sitting down to make some resolutions. Or as I like to call them, goals. I like goals. I like having something to work towards. Something that marks a year for you and gives it significance. One of the hardest things about (finally) leaving university was the absence of clearly defined years. All through school I had a purpose that year. Finishing J1. Finishing J2. All the way through to finishing seventh form. It then turned into 'my first year of university', 'my honours year', 'that year I wrote and rewrote thesis proposals and then a couple of month after I was finally accepted they decided you didn't have to write proposals for mere MA degrees anymore', 'the year I wrote a thesis', 'the year I finished a thesis and got a job'.

After leaving university it's been different. It's been a couple of years of 'that year I had a job', 'that year I still had a job but the office became a different colour', 'holy crap it is now 2013, what am I going to do with myself this year?'

Sure, I did stuff in those two years. I went overseas by myself for the first time, and I jumped off the Sky Tower, and I took up golf.

BTW proof of the Sky Tower thing:

I missed having goals though. So I've made some writerly goals for this year.

• Finish writing One Last Day. This story (the product of two Camp NaNoWriMos) is proving more difficult to write than I thought it would be. I'm treading a more careful, and therefore slower, path as I write the first draft. Normally I can blaze through a novel to end up with a very rough first draft, but I'm going about this one more deliberately. I'm not under any delusions of grandeur or anything, and it's still going to be a first draft, and first drafts are always bad. (That's why theyr'e first drafts.) I'd like to finish it though, even if the first draft stage is where it stops.
• Rewrite and edit The Girl Who Saved the World. (Last November's NaNo novel.)
• Blog once a fortnight.
• Win NaNoWriMo again in November.
• Read 104 books. Why 104? That's two a week. Why read? Because writers need to read. That's how you learn how to write, how story works.
• Read at least two books a month. This may seem like a 'well, duh' moment, given that I have just said I will read 104 books. But I'm sure there will be months when it is easy to read a lot (January, the holiday month, for example) and other months when it is not.
• Of those two books, one will be a book like those I write. You need to know your market. You need to know how your genre works.
• Of those two books, one will be a book I wouldn't normally pick up. (So basically anything that's not a YA.)
• Finish a fanfic I have abandoned for the past two years. Somebody added it to their favourites list the other week and I feel bad about it being unfinished.
• Do a manuscript swap with a fellow writer. This is a scary one! I plan to swap a (part of) a manuscript with another writer for feedback and criticism.

I'm not sure what I'm going to label 2013 with these goals, but maybe I'll have a better idea in December!

In other exciting developments, Adelaide is happening! It's only 51 days away. I need to be at the airport at a ridiculous hour that morning (see: So Early That It Shouldn't Exist, and also I Can't Tell If This Time Is Morning Or Actually Still Night) so hopefully I manage that. I'm super excited, especially since I'll be staying with my aunt who's also going to Writers' Week, yay!

That reminds me, I need to get onto getting a passport so that I can actually leave the country.

This year is going to be awesome.