RESOLVED: cats are adorable

Normally I don't do New Year's resolutions, because I think they are hokey and also kind of pressure-making, which might be the point. But ever since I've started making daily to-do lists (about which, more later), I've reconsidered it, for what is a New Year's resolution but a to-do list for the entire year? So I've made a few very basic resolutions which I think I can complete, and am sharing them online, because I have heard that nothing makes you want to stick to a resolution like sharing it with the "blogosphere." OK here goes!

1. Write in this blog at least 50 times. This works out to one post a week, roughly, which seems do-able. Of course I am not going to say "post every Friday" or something because that's just setting myself up for failure. So maybe sometimes there will be two posts in one week or weeks without one, and that's okay. This is where having a dedicated specialized topic for my blog would help, but oh well, that's not the way I roll.

2. Write at least five short stories. Again, this doesn't sound very impressive, until you realize that I only wrote two short stories this year (and one was flash fiction), and a whopping zero the year before. I'm never going to be as prolific as some people, but if I can sound like sort of a jackass, I kind of think I have a fairly low crap-to-noncrap ratio. Instead of a dozen awful novels on my hard drive, I only have two, and I don't think one of them is very awful at all. I don't write unless I feel I truly have something to say, and while this leads to some very long droughts, in some ways this is better than having a billion words to pare down and refine. Perhaps it is not a good idea to even put a hard-numbered short story writing goal on this list, considering that I've proven that I can't possibly stick to the writerly maxim of "write every day," but I feel five stories is more than achievable even with my scattershot output, and even if I only get three, well, that's better than this year or the year before or really any year except 2005, which was a freak year in so many ways which I will not get into right now.

3. Do everything in my power to get a driver's license. I can't control whether I will pass the test or not, or whether my eyes will even be good enough to get a (restricted) permit. But I have to try. If all goes well with the eye doctor next month, I'll take my knowledge test the next day, and then on to state-mandated driving classes. If things don't go well with the eye doctor... I find another eye doctor (or a surgeon, since implanted contact lenses are something I want to do eventually anyway, this is the final excuse). Maybe I'll get another half-dozen failures on my permit, but I doubt it; I kind of think driving will be a lot easier for me this time around thanks to Vitamin R.

4. Write another zine. No way this one won't get done. It is on the list so I can have at least one goal on this list which is sure to be achieved. HA! (P.S. Obligatory distro link drop.)

There are of course other things I hope to achieve, like getting a part-time job, and making some more friends in Maryland, but those aren't really things you can put a benchmark/timetable on like you can writing projects. "Make five friends/receive 12 callbacks from potential employers?" That's just silly. Besides, as this is my first time making New Year's resolutions, I figure it's better to start small, sort of like I did with the to-do lists.