January Has Arrived

Overwhelmed by resolutions? You're not alone

Photo by Tim Mossholder

With 2024 officially at a close, the time of year for reflection and goal setting has come upon us. I want to start off by reminding you how arbitrary New Year resolutions are. The world is still spinning in the same direction. For 2025, the first of the year happened on a Wednesday, the middle of the week, arbitrary. Fresh starts are defined by us. We make the rules. Make a resolution on a Wednesday in the middle of April. It doesn’t make a difference.

With all that being said, though, I love making resolutions! I am a list maker and goal setter. I enjoy checking things off of lists. However, I also have a tendency to hold my value to the accomplishment of these lists. So the idea of creating unrealistic resolutions has been on my mind lately. Matt from Matters with Matt wrote a great piece that got me in the mindset of selecting realistic and kind resolutions for the year.

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Photo by Madison Inouye

When it comes to resolutions, I focused on areas of my life that are less structured: my writing and self-care. I’m the only one guiding those trains and it’s dark out with a fog obscuring the tracks. It wouldn’t take much to go off the rails and then I’m sad and cranky and no fun to be around (And no one wants a cranky wife or mom or teacher!)

This is my brief introduction (it was longwinded there for a bit, but I trimmed it back) of my resolutions this year: my goals for writing and my goals for keeping my sanity so I can continue doing all the things I want to do in the short twenty-four hour in a day. I wanted to share my goals with you today.

Content not Happy

I started with thinking about what makes me content. I chose content intentionally. Not what makes me happy or excited, but what makes me content on an ordinary day. Being happy all the time is an unrealistic expectation. If that is my goal, I won’t complete it, and then I’ll get frustrated and cranky, I won’t be the parent I want to be to my daughter, and my poor husband will thoughtfully try to make me sit down and relax because that’s what I often need to do, but I wouldn’t want to do that because I haven’t met my goal. It’s all very much If You give a Mouse a Cookie, a total mess. I’m sticking with being content.

Reading

A regular reading practice keeps me content. Getting lost in a good book overfills my self-care bucket. For example, I finished Gino Enrique Piancetti’s book Invasion of the Daffodils while visiting family over the New Year. I LOVED it. I couldn’t stop talking about it. I gave my copy to my sister-in-law so she could read it and I would have someone who actually knew what I was talking about.

I’ve been riding that great book high for a week now. Of course, not all my reads are going to get me that excited, but if I am not reading regularly, I’ll be less likely to find those gems.

So this year, I made a few general reading goals:

• I want to read more young adult books so I can make recommendations to my middle school students. (I started listening to Small Spaces by Katerine Arden yesterday, so I’ve started with this one!)

• I want to read more indie books (Elle Griffin’s novel, Obscurity, is up first)

• And finally, I want to take time to reread my old favorites (I don’t even know where to start!)

Writing

I finished the year by completing the first draft of Marredbury. That felt so good!! It has been a couple years since I’ve finished a big project like this. I’m still feeling great about this accomplishment. Woo hoo!

I am going to step away from Marredbury for a while. I have a writer group that is providing me feedback, so in the meantime, I’m going to tackle another project and get some space from the Marredbury world. My hope is to get a draft of a novel written this year. Wish me luck!

I did want to leave you with a cool audio clip, though. I was exploring Google Notebook LM. This is an AI tool, so apologies to those who are worried about AI. I’m curious about the possibilities that come with AI, whether I like the process and use of it. The way I see it, AI is here. It isn’t going anywhere and it is going to shift the internet and many parts of everyday life. I won’t get into all my thoughts on AI right now, though. I used Notebook LM as a kind of Super Series Bible. A Series Bible is the collection of all the information an author needs to know in a series they are working on. As the series grows bigger, there is more an author needs to remember: the eye color of the protagonist, ages and names of their parents, the climate of the setting, etc. This is a tedious task, lots of notetaking. With Notebook LM, I upload my series (I read through everything, it is a private upload similar to Google Drive), and I now have an AI assistant that I can ask questions to which will search my documents and provide me with the answers based on my work.

(Caption: The notebook even gave my series a little volcano emoji. A bit creepy, a bit ColbyStream-like. We’ll have to keep an eye on that…)

I think it’s kind of cool. The notebook will also create a timeline, a briefing document, and an audio clip about your content. I’m still playing with all the features. I think it will be extra helpful when I jump back into my other series. After taking time away from a series, it would be great to ask the notebook for details that I may have forgotten and where I can find the information, instead of me having to scroll through the entire manuscript.

I couldn’t resist. I asked Notebook LM to create an audio overview of this first season of Marredbury. Again, it’s impressive (to the point of being scary?) how natural these overview hosts sound. It’s like two podcasters did a deep dive on my series. Check it out:

Being intentional with my reading selections and a new writing project are my resolutions for this year. What goals are you setting?