In October, I learned that a window of publishing opportunity was going to close at the end of 2025 and I promised myself (and others) that I would compile a book of property renovations (before and after pictures with short commentary).
The window closes this week, and I blew my deadline, so 2025 goes out on a note of regret. It did not help that I have been almost literally prostrate for the last six weeks with an excruciatingly painful back injury, but that is an excuse and not a justification for lackadaisical planning.
I resolve to plan better in 2026. Of course, planning is no use if one lacks the discipline to follow through.
Does a well-filled out desk calendar provide discipline? Or is it merely a reminder of dates, deadlines, and intentions? Anyway, I resolve to fill out my desk calendar. Perhaps I won't forget my sister-in-law's birthday if I add a "mail-a-card" memo a couple of weeks ahead of her big day.
What are other writers suggesting for their New Year's Resolutions?
As most writers know, "ideas" cannot be copyrighted. It's the "expression" of ideas and the descriptions of thoughts, feelings, gestures and actions that --rightly so-- are protected by copyright laws and common decency.
Another resolution of mine: continue to give credit by name and url when recycling other people's ideas.
Talking of other people's ideas.... To-Do list-maker Kristina Adams suggests that writers ought to resolve to read 52 books (by a variety of other people) every year.
That seems daunting. My thought would be, read 52 reviews a year. This is easily accomplished by simply following this alien romances blog and reading Karen Wiesner's reviews, also those of Margaret Carter.
Of course, you do also have to read and re-read some of the "greats" in your genre and in other genres, but perhaps one a week is indeed too aspirational.
If you have earned money from writing, find out if you can set up an IRA. No matter how paltry the initial sum, your IRA does not pay capital gains tax, so you can day trade. Use the discipline of a calendar. Sell high and buy back low. You don't have to "pick a top" or for that matter "pick a bottom", just decide what is a reasonable profit, set a Good Till Cancelled limit price to sell, and wait for your stocks to sell. Then, set a Good Till Cancelled limit price to buy the same stock back for less. Repeat.
Never sell for a loss in an IRA. If the stock account is something other than an IRA, you need a calendar to make sure that you wait 31 days after selling for a loss before buying back for less. Also, if you are going to "harvest" losses, make sure you set your dividend investment instructions to "Pay Cash" rather than "Reinvest" or your dividends might create a partial "wash sale".
Erica Verillo has an excellent blog about new years writing resolutions, especially about recycling older works, with a link to publishers who accept previously published articles.
Her last name is also an object lesson in the importance of proof-reading. AI seems to make it harder, not easier, to write cleanly and accurately. Spell check routinely revises unfamiliar words to something its programmers recommend ("verily").
There appears to be general agreement everywhere I looked that blogging is still important... having your own blog or vlog, guest blogging, inviting guests to your blog. Blog regularly (weekly), and interact.
Writers are recommended to make writer friends and interact with them, bounce ideas off one another, share passages from a work -- some sources suggest that one needs 12 different readers to read the same page, because 12 readers might read the same words differently, like the six men of Hindustan to learning much inclined who went to "see" the elephant though all of them were blind.
Advisors agree that it is very good indeed to try writing poetry, or writing in another genre, or trying a style or topic that one dreads.
Above all, the bottom line is.... the bottom line. You cannot publish a blank page, you cannot sell a work that is not finished.
Recommended resources for writerly New Year's resolutions:
Erica Verillo
Kristina Adams
Wishing you all a productive, prosperous and Happy New Year,
All the best,
Posts
I don't make resolutions as such anymore, haven't for a long time. I do think in terms of goals, keeping them modest -- things I'm almost certain I can meet. One is to get my annual vampire bibliography update finished and distributed before the end of January. Another is to complete my post-mortem instruction document (something that's been in the back of my mind for a long time, but spurred into action by advice from the lawyer who recently wrote new wills for us) before I fly to Orlando for the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in March. Also to finish answering all the prompts that appeal to me in the "do-it-yourself autobiography" notebook one of the kids gave me years ago. If my principal publisher puts out a call for submissions I could reasonably write a story for, doing that would be a goal. Finally, very important, arranging to visit our daughter who moved to Germany earlier this year.
ReplyDeleteRead 52 books per year? That's only a book a week! I read two or three every week, hard to specify exactly because I have at least two going simultaneously at all times, sometimes three. But, then, everybody reads at their own pace and has different life obligations to be busy with (we're retired).
Rowena, I really appreciated this article at a time when I’ve spent the last six months recovering from a life event that derailed everything and prevented me from rising enough to even make goals for myself. For most of my adult life, I’ve lived almost religiously by the kinds of goals that would probably make other people have a heart attack merely in response. But I was good at meeting them, and I came to believe myself to be some kind of superhero because I fulfilled them and sometimes more each and every year. Last year, health concerns and other life “distractors” turned even the most stringent planning right on its head. Lackadaisical planning (as you suggested yours were) wasn’t the issue for me (and probably wasn’t for you either) so much as those “distractors” of life getting in the way and sabotaging will with flagging energy. I didn’t accomplish a whole lot last year, and yet I think I needed to let go of the rigidity that characterized my youth. I needed to learn how to be in the moment instead of projecting so far out into the future. That said, I believe we do need the reminder of dates, deadlines and intentions, even if we can’t always meet them. I did managed to read nearly 400 books last year (many of them short stories, which I can read several of in a single day). I like your suggestion for reading reviews of books sometimes in place of the books themselves. I may try that myself. (Thank you for offering the ones I write for the blog as a good starting place.) For 2026, I’ve set a few goals for myself that I’m already hard at work attempting to complete them. Because I set a lot less for myself to accomplish, I’ll be able to have the best of both words, I think.
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