2019: Fucking Bring It

          New Year's Resolutions. Just like aesthetically-arranged photos of their food, many people have them and enjoy showing them to you whether you want to see them or not. Don't worry, I'm not gonna mention anything I've had to eat today; I just thought that since, for the first time in several years, I actually have some concrete resolutions to fail at instead of vague "be more positive about things" ones that never seem to go well, I might as well share them with you. I guess the "right" thing to say is that I'm doing it to hopefully inspire some of you out there to make and hold to your own, and if that happens, great, but I'm not gonna be in your face about it. I shouldn't be responsible for inspiring other people when the only things I can really inspire myself to do are eating something chocolatey and/or having exhausted 2 AM crying jags. So here's my resolutions, for whatever they're worth. 

          1.) Go to bed before 11 PM. Sounds like a small thing, but after 11 PM your body gets a cortisol boost that wires you up and keeps you up later (something I discovered the science behind only recently, and which explains all the post-11 boosts I'd get while visiting Abby at college in Philly, which I just put down to the giant bags of Starburst jelly beans I'd consume during Californication binges). And when you have hypothyroidism, (especially when for nearly a year I was being given too high a dose of medication, so much so that I actually began exhibiting hyperthyroidism symptoms and completely exhausted every single bodily system I have), adrenal fatigue, PCOS, and myofascial pain syndrome, a chronic neuromuskuloskeletal condition my insurance company cut my pelvic PT off for earlier in the year, well, that only makes an ugly situation even worse. Earlier in the year, during my initial research into adrenal fatigue, I discovered this threshold and tried going to bed earlier and found, shockingly, that I actually did start feeling better not long afterwards. Of course, life intervenes, and so in the months since then my schedule has gotten skewed to shit every which way and I haven't always stuck to what's good for me, whether in sleep, diet, exercise, or work, but in 2019 I'm gonna do my damnedest to fix this, starting with sleep, because if I feel rested for the first time in years, it'll probably be easier to tackle the rest of the mess that is me. 

          2.) Write more. And of course I mean that in general, because my head generates multiple novels, stories, characters, poems, and plays a day and I'd like to capture at least some of them, but more specifically I mean the huge stack of what I call "I should write..." stories: ones I came up with a while (sometimes years) back, was and still am really excited for, but have kept putting off for various reasons. You know, because other deadlined stories got in the way, I moved on from the phase I was in when I came up with it, that kind of shit. These are the stories I email my long-suffering friends with saying that I think I'm finally gonna do this one, or that one, or I should write Z after I finish up X and Y and finally get it off my story-idea stack but never do, the ones that I really do mean to write and want to but just haven't. I want this to be the year where I finally start making some headway, getting more of them checked off in my little idea notebook and turning "I should write..." into "Hey, I wrote..." Because enough is enough, and the damn things will never get done unless I actually do them. So I'm gonna do them. That's what I keep telling myself, anyway.

          3.) Balance. I am not the most organized or time-efficient person in the world. Maybe it's because I'm a Gemini (whenever you need a scapegoat, the stars offer a convenient excuse. They're too far away to defend themselves.), maybe it's just the way my brain is set up, but I've never had much luck working on more than one project at once. I suspect the only reason I finished the first draft of my novel as quickly as I did was because I cut out all other projects at the time and focused solely on that, resuming my short story work after I was done. After a few more short stories (one of which was recently accepted for publication in an upcoming Darkwater Syndicate automotive-horror anthology; updates as they occur) I went back to novels, using NaNoWriMo to start a second one I knew full well I wouldn't finish in a month, but could at least get a solid head start on. Which I did, getting through nearly five chapters by the last day of November and planning to continue working on it along with short stories, since I had four short story deadlines within a few months of each other. That has not gone as planned, and while I understand that since one is deadlined and the other is not, it's all right if I focus more on the short story du jour than the novel, I don't want to fall into the pit of always finding a reason to put the novel off, no matter how much fucking trouble it's giving me at the moment (I love you, sweetie, but goddamn you're a problem child), in favor of short stories. So this year I want to try finding a better balance between all my various projects—maybe not an even distribution of time and attention, because HA HA HA, but something a little better than my current seesaw method. 

          4.) Read more. Because my to-be-read book stacks at home have been getting higher and higher lately, and if you don't hear from me again it's because they finally toppled and buried me alive under a pile of ignored literature. As a lifelong reader, it's embarrassing, and now potentially life-threatening. Also because I used to carry at least one book around with me everywhere I went, and I fell off that for some reason the last year or so, and it's time I fixed that. 

          5.) I heard recently that it's better to make resolutions you can do something about as opposed to ones you can't—as per their example, make a resolution to query more agents in 2019 instead of saying "I will get an agent in 2019." After all, you can query an agent a day for the next year and still end up without one. In that vein, my fifth resolution for this year is to send out more submissions, instead of "publish more things." I tend to get into ruts where I don't send anything out for a while, then submit in a few quick bursts, then go radio silent for another stretch of time. This year I'm aiming for more plentiful and consistent submissions—after all, you can't get accepted if you don't send stuff out, right? Of course, you can't get rejected and have your heart fucking stepped on and kicked back in your face by an editor who wouldn't know a decent poem or story if it was wadded up and shoved down their throat, either, but hey, nothing dared, nothing won. And I plan to win.

          Hey, look at that. I was pretty positive there for a minute, huh? I guess I can do it after all. At least until the next rejection.