2015: A Good Year For Writing

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve made writing resolutions for New Year’s. I do not take resolutions lightly, as my “finisher” personality type usually means I won’t easily let them go. In the past couple years, I’ve expanded the types of writing I’m doing and the venues for it, so that I divide my writing time between blogging, journaling, book reviews, and fiction. This means I’ve often found myself needing to switch gears when a certain deadline or opportunity arose. As such, my writing resolutions this year are sensible and flexible — specific enough to push me forward, but with enough wiggle room for me to cast new goals as the year develops.

1. First, I’ve started a new blog project, A Year in Disney Movies, in which I will watch every Disney animated classic in chronological order and write my reaction. Some of these movies I’ve seen hundreds of times. Some I’ve never seen before, and many I haven’t seen since I was a child.  I’ve already written my entry for Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs, and I watched Pinocchio last night and will be blogging it soon.
2. I will finish my second draft of Stories from the Tower, my Rapunzel retelling, hopefully in the first quarter of the year.
3. After that, I will start another “big” writing project, yet to be determined. The contenders are:

• Jumping right into the third draft of Stories from the Tower
• Revising my Middle Grade novel, Ever This Day, based on what I learned in Cheryl Klein’s workshop or
• Starting draft 2 of Ice Eternal, this year’s NaNoWriMo novel

I’m also endeavoring to read 100 books again, which I will review on Goodreads and Booklikes.

Just to keep things interesting, my “writing laptop,” Shimbleshanks, crashed yesterday. The fan stopped working, which means I can’t use it for too long without it overheating. Luckily, no data was lost, but I quickly moved all my stories onto a jump drive as soon as I got the computer to boot up again. I have another laptop from work, as well as my desktop computer in my office. But both those computers run Windows, and I have come to prefer writing in Linux. Not only does it give me a cleaner interface with fewer distractions and run more quickly, but it’s the only operating system for which Scrivener has a free software package. And since I’ve fallen in love with Scrivener, and since my Rapunzel story is a Scrivener file, I also need to move finding a new writing computer to the top of my list. See what I mean about the need for flexible writing resolutions?