The Monthly Reset and Dodging Curve Balls

By

Scott D. Parker

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about giving yourself the grace to start, stop, and then restart a habit. That was just after Quitter’s Day 2025.

 

Today is 1 February 2025. It’s been thirty-one days since New Year’s Day. How are you habits coming along? How’s that new story or book working out for you?

 

I picked up an older story sitting at around 10,000 words on 1 January and, as of yesterday, I reached achieved a hair more than 21,000 new words. Not quite the pace I imagined as I opened my laptop early on New Year’s Morning—I frankly expected at least 31,000—but those are 21,000 new words I didn’t have. So that’s a win and I’ll proudly wave the flag.

 

It’s important we celebrate our victories, both large and small, because things can change your life in the blink of an eye. Like it did for me this past week.

 

My day job changed our in-office policy from hybrid (in office Tuesday through Thursday; work from home on Mondays and Fridays) to the full five days in the office. Naturally, after three-plus years of that kind of working routine, everyone is having to adjust.

 

But aside from the disruptions and the adjustments and the very obvious blessing of still having a job, a silver lining appeared.

 

On my WFH days, I would always each lunch and play games (backgammon and Yahtzee; 3 games each) with my wife. Now, I truly miss those times, but I quickly realized that with me being in the office, I have two additional hours of writing. It doesn’t easily equate to the missing time with the wife, but my writer self can be two hours more productive.

 

Now, fellow writer, we face a new month, one with a nice and even twenty-eight days. What are your goals for this month? Mine is quite simple: forge ahead on the novel and write at least 21,000 new words. And, like I always say, if you’ve fallen off the writing wagon, all you have to do is the simplest thing possible.

 

Start.

What Are You Going To Do With the 99 Days of Summer 2023?

Veteran writer Dean Wesley Smith dubs the summer months the Time of the Great Forgetting. It’s that point in the year when the good intentions of New Year’s Resolutions made in the depths of winter fall by the wayside in bright light of hot summer days when the pull to do just about anything other than writing draws writers away from their keyboards. It’s only in later summer and early fall when writers remember their annual goals and either charge full-stream ahead and barrel to the end of the year, desperately hoping to achieve their milestones, or just give up and do something else.

He speaks the truth.

But I’ve come to see the summer months as an almost perfect time capsule to get things done, including writing.

Bookended Time

Starting with Memorial Day and ending on Labor Day in September, summer has a definitive beginning and ending. The only span of time that rivals this is Halloween-to-New Year’s Day. Unlike the holidays—which a chock full of known events and Christmas pageants visits to friends and family—the summer months are largely unstructured. School’s out, vacation season is in, and we all get to collectively breath deep for a few short weeks before we do it all again in the fall.

The summer vibe is looser. We wear different types of clothes. We read different kinds of books, the beach reads if you will. And we watch certain types of movies. I’ve already seen one of my favorite movies of the year—Fast X, a rollercoaster in a movie theater—and canNOT wait until both Michael Kenton’s Batman and Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones share the multiplexes for the first time since 1989. 

The clearly marked beginning and ending of summer also is the perfect time to do something creative, including writing. There are 99 days this summer—97 if you don’t include Memorial and Labor Day. Just imagine what you can do. Write a 99,000-word novel if you write 1,000 words per day. Or maybe two shorter works of, say, 45,000 words each. In the 14 weeks we get this year, you could write 14 short stories. Writing is merely a habit, and if you get into the habit of writing, it will be difficult to stop it.

Just imagine, come the Monday of Labor Day, the tremendous sense of accomplishment you’ll feel when you look back over Summer 2023 and marvel at what you’ve done. It’s just like your New Year’s Resolutions but for a shorter period of time.

Your Summer Resolutions

Come to think of it, why not think of them as Summer Resolutions. Or your Summer Goals List. 

So spend some time this weekend thinking about what you want to write or accomplish this summer. Make a list—on paper—hang it on the fridge, and look at it everyday. Then, each day, when you open the fridge, ask yourself if you have moved the needle forward on those goals. When you do the incremental daily work, the end result will be greater than you could imagine.

It’s Never Too Late to Restart Resolutions and Habits

By
Scott D. Parker

How are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along?

I saw a statistic that said by today—Day 36 of 2023—a shocking 80% or more people have already given up on the resolutions they so fervently made at midnight on 1 January. Eighty percent. I think the figure is higher, to be honest. There’s even a holiday to help folks who waver on their resolutions. It’s called National Quitter’s Day and that was back on 13 January.

As I wrote back in December, I had certain personal goals—okay, let’s just call them habits, okay? That’s what they really are—that I wanted to do in January. I started re-reading the Psalms (one a day for 150 days), I re-read the Proverbs (31 chapters for 31 days in January), and have started to re-read Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic. Taking a cue from Bryon Quertermous, I bought a weekly planner and kept track of every habit I wanted to set.

So far? Success. It’s feels very nice to have reached the last day of the why-does-it-feel-so-long January and all my boxes were checked.

The other thing that also was checked? The writing habit. My writing goal for January was simple: start a new project and write on it every day. I had no word count goal but I tend to zero in on 1,000 words per session. Again, 100% success.

Now, it wasn’t perfect. There were a couple of days when I had to slog through the writing, but I sat down and did it.

By the 31st of January, I had amassed approximately 39,000 words on the new novel. That’s not quite NaNoWriMo speed (50,000 words over 30 days) but considering the dismal writing I did in 2022, I’ll take the win. You know how I knew the new habit was locked in? When on that first Saturday morning, I opted not to watch a movie before I finished my words for the day. That Saturday Habit has continued. That, my friends, is a fantastic feeling.

But what do you do if life threw you curve balls in January and you’ve had to catch them, dodge them, hit them, or let them hit you?

Start again. Seriously it’s that simple. Just start.

What’s great about February is that it has the fewest days of any month. If you’ve wanted to start a new habit and have fallen off the wagon, start again on Monday. Do the writing, do the exercise, do the reading, do the calling of your friends or family you haven’t spoken to in a long time. There are only 24 more days in February. It’s a nice, short length of time to get back to the habit you know you want to ingrain in your brain.

Start today or tomorrow and do that new habit every day for a week. Your reward? The Super Bowl. Then aim for the next week. You make it that far, you’ll only have ten more days until the end of the month.

You know you want to create that new resolution, that new habit. I’m here to tell you that it’s never too late. But you will have to do one thing:

Start.

When Life Throws Curve Balls at Your Resolutions

By
Scott D. Parker

How are those resolutions coming along?

It’s Day 7 of January 2023, a full week after many of us toasted the new year at midnight and resolved to make changes in our lives. Back in December, I wrote about making resolutions—or habit changes—with the guiding principle of “just try.” Most of us want to change something about ourselves—to become a better version of ourselves—so the first step is to decide to try. The next (and the next and the next) is to follow through.

Depending on where you get your data, a large percentage of folks who make new year’s resolutions fail by February. One statistic I found was 80%. That means 80% of people who want to change decide to renege [yeah that’s spelled correctly; I actually had to look it up] on their promises to themselves. January 19 seems to be the date most associated with throwing in the towel on resolutions. One fact I read claimed that 23% quit their resolutions in the first week. Hopefully you are not in that number.

So far, neither am I.

Most of the changes I want to implement are habits. I fell out of taking a multi-vitamin in the latter half of the year so I’m starting to take them again. Six for six as of this writing. Ditto for consuming a daily dose of apple cider vinegar, performing daily push-ups, getting up and moving [either walking or the rowing machine; walking won this week], and daily readings [Psalms, Proverbs, and the Daily Stoic]. The principles found in James Clear’s Atomic Habits provided me the tools necessary to maintain the habits I want to implement.

And, inspired by fellow writer Bryon Quertermous, I bought a weekly planner to keep track of everything. I make daily notes when I perform the habit. I don’t anticipate having 365 days of check marks saying I took a vitamin because after a certain number of days, the habit becomes ingrained. It’s how I started and maintained my flossing habit.

But here’s the key metric for any new habit: inevitably, one day you’ll miss or forget or somehow not do the new task. Let that roll off your shoulders and stay focused on the overall goal. Adjust if you have to and try not to miss two in a row. It was a lesson I applied yesterday.

The Writing Resolution

The year 2022 was not a good one for me writing-wise. As such, a major resolution for me was to get back in the habit of writing. Taking a cue from key message from author Mary Robinette Kowal at her book signing here in Houston back in November, I’m starting the year off with a brand-new story. Yes, I have multiple unfinished stories, but am channeling Kowal’s theory of why NaNoWriMo works for her: the writing is Novel, Interesting, Challenging, and Urgent.

So, for me, the new book is novel (as in brand-new). I’m interested in the story I’m telling. I find it challenging in that I’m starting from a story pitch and a general sense of what kind of story it is and how I want to tell it. As for urgency, I would love to finish the story by 31 January, but I’m allowing myself a goal of six weeks. I’ll grant myself until 28 February if things get complicated.

Crucially, I don’t have a set writing goal in terms of word count. All that matters is forward progress. I started the year with 1,028 words, a great start considering I haven’t written fiction in months. I topped 1,600 words twice this week, both on days in which I went into the office (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays). By the time yesterday rolled around, my first work-from-home day of the year, I was excited: with no commute, I could wake at the same time and get a substantial chunk of writing done before I logged into my work computer.

That was the plan. Didn’t work out that way.

The Friday Curveball

I had Alexa set to sound the alarm at 5:30am. As a bit of background, the Christmas break was not as restful as I wanted and I’ve been trying to catch up on sleep. I’ve been tired this week and, despite my attempt to get up at the alarm, I was still catching up. “Alexa,” I said yesterday morning into the dark, “set an alarm for 5:45.” With those words, I rolled over for an extra fifteen minutes.

Forty-seven minutes later, I woke. Still in the dark. I smiled at myself for thinking I was so excited and ready to get to writing that I had beaten the alarm. I checked my digital watch. 6:17am. What the heck? Did the power go out? Nope, the ceiling fan was spinning. Puzzled, I asked Alexa what the alarm was set for. “5:45pm.”

That brought a huge sigh from me. Sure, I needed the sleep, but I had slept through my writing time. I only had time to get up, take out the dogs, shower, eat breakfast, and get to work. What would become of my new daily writing habit?

I adjusted.

I worked really hard on all my day job activities, got them all complete, and, late in the afternoon, I opened up my writing computer and picked up where I left off during my Thursday lunch hour. To be honest, it was weird writing so late in the day. I became a morning writer ten years ago—lunch hour writer when I have to go into the office—so it’s been a long time since I wrote fiction so late in the day.

But you know what? It worked. I made forward progress, clocked in 1,694 new words, and my writing resolution remained intact. All is good.

The key takeaway: Life will throw curve balls at your resolutions. Take the hits if you can and adjust accordingly. Just stay focused on the end goal: becoming a better you.

New Year’s Resolutions: Just Try

by
Scott D. Parker

Do you have your New Year’s resolutions planned yet?

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s still two weeks away but this will be my last post at Do Some Damage until January. But I’ve already started thinking and planning the things I want to accomplish in 2023 and it is really important to kick off the year on a good note.

On the Daily Stoic podcast, host Ryan Holiday wondered why we constantly make New Year’s resolutions and he brought in a quote from Samuel Johnson: “Reformation is necessary and despair is criminal.” I looked up this quote to see if it is part of something larger and it is: “When I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try, because reformation is necessary and despair is criminal. I try, in humble hope of the help of God.”

I know lots of folks have a good first week in January and then, by around the six-week mark, most folks have given up on their resolutions. But you don’t have to.

Which I why I’ve been structuring my own resolutions around smaller yet quantifiable goals. The key for me is to have a good January so that I can maintain the newly formed habit. For me, any new resolution I make I will do during the 31 days of January. I will keep track of the new habits daily and mark them on my calendar. Then, by 1 February, the bulk of the new habits will have become ingrained. It’s how I started my flossing habit and there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t floss.

But let’s circle back to the Johnson quote, the longer one. What he’s basically saying is that when he examines his life, he sees where he’s faltered and then questioned why try again. For many, that’s reason enough not to make resolutions For me, however, I am always optimistic that new habits and resolutions can be made and kept and maintained. I’m always looking for ways to improve my life—as a husband, father, writer, friend—and I’ll always make New Year’s resolutions.

Because what’s the alternative? You get older and then you look back on your life and wish you would have started something. Which ties right back to a quote I have pinned to my cork board: A year from now, you will have wished you started today.

Make “today” be 1 January 2023, start something new, and make your future self proud.

A New Year's Goals, Not Resolutions

By Claire Booth

We’re a week into the new year, and have I made any resolutions yet? Nope. I’ve never really been into that sort of thing. I think that’s because I’m very aware that life can throw you curveballs – good and bad – and to navigate them requires a certain amount of flexibility that a resolution doesn’t give you. (You pass or you fail. The end.) 

Resolutions: Carved in stone.

Now I do have goals for the coming year. Finish the book I’m writing and start another one. Train the new puppy. Go to crime fiction conferences. Plant a garden.

But notice how those are goals, and not set-in-stone promises? Maybe I’ll decide to enroll in classes that will use up my budget for conferences. Maybe I’ll break my leg and be unable to plant that garden.

(Okay, I’ll admit that the puppy training isn't something that can be modified or exchanged for something different. It must be done. She’s currently gnawing on my slipper.)

I don’t like being pinned down, and I’ve always felt that resolutions do that. So instead, I’ll go into 2018 with some flexible goals and an appreciative anticipation of the unexpected.  

Reading more in 2016

By Steve Weddle

Happy New Year and all that crap. We're getting back into the full swing of things here at DoSomeDamage. so you'll see postings pick back up the next couple weeks. Your prayers have been answered.

Did you make any resolutions for the new year? Good. I did, but they're none of your damn business,

Anyway, as readers and writers, what are the things we're supposed to make for resolutions?

I logged in to Goodreads the other day since LinkedIn was down and I needed something else to do on the internet. They have this Reading Challenge for 2016 over there. It looks like this:

Damn right I want to read books in 2016. And magazines. Newspapers. Blog posts. All sorts of things. Of course I do. So I go to check the box there, and it turns out they want me to put a number in that slot. What the heck am I supposed to do? How many books am I supposed to read? More than I read last year? Should I read fewer books but more pages? 

Goodreads would probably like for me to read many, many books. They'd like for me to update my status as I read, review books I read, join discussion groups to talk about books I read.  

Helpfully, they've let me know what others are doing:

People are PLEDGING to read books? (What's that on your chest, mister? A pledge pin, sir.) OK. Do I get a coffee mug if I pledge to read 50 books? A tote bag for 100? An Arlo Guthrie/Judy Collins DVD for 200? The box says 37 million books have been pledged. I guess they'd like me to join in. Of course, Goodreads (owned by Amazon) would also like for me to click the Audible (owned by Amazon) ad below to get a book to listen to or click over to Amazon itself to buy some books to read. Sure, Amazon wants me to pledge to read 48 books. Heck, if I sold lemonade on the corner, I'd want you to pledge to buy 100 cups or more. That makes great sense from a financial perspective. And I'd certainly agree that we should read more. I just disagree that increasing the number of books -- or even bothering with counting -- is the best way to measure whether you're reading more.

Read in more genres this year. Do you read mysteries and thrillers? Have you slid in a biography of a pirate? A space opera? A book of essays? I'm kinda in love with Rebecca Solnit essays at the moment. She wrote a book called Men Explain Things to Me, which has been fairly popular. The one I'm reading is called The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciouness, and has a brilliant piece on the Katrina response, as well as a clever, sly essay on California punk rock and how the 1970s maybe didn't exist at all. How about letters? Do you read collections of letters? The Nabokov letters recently made a big splash, judging from the reviews I read everywhere. Westerns? When's the last time you read a real Western? True Crime? A book on foods from Siberia? Just think of what we could learn if we spread our vision to other sections of the bookstore. Heck, maybe you're way ahead of me on that. 

Read more "different" voices. As a white dude, I still read many white dudes. I don't say to myself, "Hey, sexy, You've read a white dude this weekend. Your next read should be by a Martian." I have been hugely successful in picking out books from folks around the world. I mean, just type "Nigerian novel" into the Google searches and you can't go wrong with the first couple pages of searches. Here's a list I've found super helpful, too. 100 Must Read Nigerian Novels Of course, you can go with Iceland. New Zealand. Ukraine. The world awaits you.

Read short stories. I will run across a short story in Zoetrope or the New Yorker or at a thousand other places and end up buying a collection from that author. That's how I ran across Rebecca Lee's amazing collection, Bobcat. I don't always read every story in the book I end up with. (Sorry, Nathan Englander.) But I read as much as I want, whether just a few stories or all of them. I find that reading stories instead of novels sometimes makes it feel as if I get to hear more voices. 

Read everyone from one author. This seems like a cool thing I'll never do, Pick a new-to-you author and read everything. Laura Lippman. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ben Okri. Sjon. Zane Grey. Heck, just pick someone. Chances are, you're missed some stories or books from even your most favorite writers. It's possible I've missed a story from Jay Stringer, though I kinda doubt it.

So, yeah, you can read more in other ways, too. You've probably already thought of some. Reading more is great. Posting reviews is great. Puppies are great. But maybe you don't want to just put a number in that empty slot. Maybe a number isn't what you need to challenge yourself this year as a reader. Maybe reading 500 books isn't the answer. Maybe, like me, you just want to read more.

Writing Resolutions: 2015

by
Scott D. Parker

So, have you broken your resolutions yet? I jest, but not by much. Odds are that, come 1 February, many folks who make resolutions in the drunken stupor at midnight of New Year’s Eve, will falter thirty-one days later.

I don’t usually do that. I make resolutions that are attainable and trackable. A few years ago, it was flossing. Everyone can and should floss, but how do you go from not being in the habit of flossing to doing it every day? Well, you make it a habit by making a streak. You start small: floss every day for the month of January. After 31 days, if you have achieved the streak, you celebrate. Then you do it again in February. You just keep doing it. I didn't break my flossing streak until after I had flossed over 1,000 straight days.

I had a very successful 2014. I completed one tale begun in late 2013, and then I started and completed four other stories. They should all be published here in 2015. My favorite achievement is the 30,000-word novella I conceived of and wrote in the month of November. I took December off, on purpose, because I have an audacious writing goal for 2015: Write fiction every day.

It should be doable, especially since I now write a lot on my iPod. Here’s the key to my success: no minimum word count. True, I’ll aim for at least 500 per day, a number I can usually reach in 15 minutes, but I won’t sweat it if I manage only 250, 200, or less. Now, I’d like to think that I can eke out more than 100, but I’m not making that rule. If I write a sentence, that counts. If I write 1,000 in a day, that doesn’t mean I don’t have to write the next day. Write fiction. Every day.

That’s one of my two professional resolutions for 2015. The other is to get my books published. Again, I’m aiming to publish more than one, but I’m keeping the goal at one book published this year. Since this’ll be my first ever book publication, it’ll be a major professional achievement. I do it once, it’ll be cause for opening a bottle of champagne. I’m hoping to open more than one bottle, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

What are your resolutions, professional or personal, for 2015.

Your New Year's Resolutions Are Stupid

By Steve Weddle

So I'm in the Emily Couric center in Charlottesville having some stuff done to me by nice people and I see this here sculpture:

That's called "Resolution" by Kurt Steger. I am very stupid and don't get art, so that looks like a circle of wood to me.

I mean, honestly, I don't get why people need to line up to see the Mona Lisa on a wall when it's already in a billion art books. You think the colors are different in person? You think it's less blurry looking? I don't get it.

And photography as art? Um, point and click. Done. Oh, look. It's in black and white. Artsy.

So, anyhoo, the circle of wood is called "Resolution." I can dig that, at least. Because most of the resolutions people make are circles. You say on Jan. 1 that you're going to lose 50 pounds and then by May you're back throwing down chicken wings at Laverne's Wild Wings so that the following Jan. 1 you plan to lose 65 pounds. Or whatevs. Maybe that's not you. I don't know you. How did you get here?

I'm beginning to think they took too much blood from me today. Shit. Is 1.6 liters much blood? It seems like much blood. But then they replaced it with something called "LifeASyn," which they say is some sort of synthetic replacement they're trying out in what sounded like some sort of guinea pig beta test thing. I dunno, to be honest with you. But when I call up my insurance company and tell them I need $45,000 coverage for my "LifeASyn," I'm probably going to need to spell it out for them. Someone in branding should have thought of that.

New Year's Resolutions are dumb, is what I was getting at. 

There's this article about changing your identity if you want to change your behavior. If you want to keep in touch with people, don't resolve to keep in touch. Just be the person who calls a friend every weekend. Here's the article: Identity-Based Habits

Look, I'm not sure why people wait until Jan. 1 to do something they want to do. If I want a taco, I go get a taco. If I want to catch up on emails, I go to the can. I don't wait. If you want to be a better writer, do it now. If you decide in November that you want to get down 1,000 a day, don't wait two months.

And yet. And yet. And yet.

We all do dumb things to get done the things we need to do. We bargain with ourselves. Maybe with God. With the clock. With our future selves.

I'm going to bed now, even though I need to write. I'm tired. I write better when I'm awake. Vibrant. So I'll go to bed now and get up early and write. Sure, that always works. Tomorrow Me will be awesome.

Next year, I'll be a better person. I won't write on my notebooks. I'll do my homework before I watch TV. I'll do the dishes before I go to bed. I'll spend more time with orphans. I'll stop making fun of my Aunt Tess's skin graft. I'll donate to charity. I'll respond to every email the very month I get it. Whatevs.

We do crazy, stupid things. Things that don't have clean edges. Last year, I NaNoWriMo'ed and it was crazy.I failed miserably. I said I was going to do it because, damn it, I wanted to have the thing done. And if you want to have the thing done, you need to do it. See, many of us would love to be able to play the oboe, but we can't. Why? Because we don't want to practice the oboe. Also, some people maybe don't know what an oboe is. I mean, I know, of course. Why don't you just tell me what you think it is and I'll tell you if you're right, k?

We have to trick ourselves. Your New Year's Resolution is stupid. You're not going to write 2,000 words a day. You're not going to read a book a week, every week. You're going to write on your notebooks the very first day because, let's face it, Megadeath does indeed rock 4evah.

As Mr. Robert Smith says, "So I trick myself. Like everybody else." He was referring to sinking, it seems. But I'm talking about resolutions and the games we play.

Ha. Remember the Alan Parsons Project? "Games People Play"? Ha. That song sucked.

Seriously, 1.6 liters. That's like one of those jugs of Coke, right? Shit. Did I say that already?

Yeah. So, we all make resolutions and play games and, while your resolution is stupid and a sure path for failure, who cares? Fail. You fail. I'll fail. We all fail for ice cream.

If NaNoWriMo gets you writing, does it matter if it sounds whackadoodle?

If a resolution motivates you, whuppie-damn-ding-dong.

Or finding pictures of crappy writers with best-sellers out and taping those pictures to your laptop with a note that says "They can do it. Why can't you, putz?"

Or a writing group. Or an MFA program.

Or repeating "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better."

Only, and here's what I think is important, don't beat yourself up over it. You have many tools in your writer's toolbox. Sure, many of them have to do with pacing and character and STORY ARC and all, but save some room for motivators. And when one stops working, you have to go to another one.

Motivation is tough, especially if you're not writing on some sort of deadline. Which is why self-imposed deadlines such as NaNoWriMo are so popular.

But making a Year's resolution just seems stupid. Make a resolution for this month or for this week. Or for the next three days. Starting Friday, spend an extra half-hour writing. A three-day resolution. Then you can make another one.

Tom Stoppard would line up a half-dozen cigarettes on the window sill and write for however long that took. He wouldn't write for X hours or X words. He'd write for X smokes. And that worked for him.

New Year's Resolutions and NaNoWrimo are suggestions, not rules. My suggestion is to look for little resolutions, little motivators.

Maybe like that Identity-Based article suggests, being the type of person who writes 1,000 words a day is easier than telling yourself to write 1,000 words a day.

I don't know. It sounds like a trick. But, then again, writing is tricky. If it were easy, they'd call it photography.

That's a joke, folks. Photography is great. Especially for people who can't paint.

Now, I'm going to go have a bit of a lie-down and see whether this LifeASyn self-replicating factor is able to put any oxygen into my brain. G'night.

February and the Power of Course Correction

by
Scott D. Parker

Many of us make New Year's resolutions for the most honest of reasons. We want to get fit, lose weight, eat better, or anything else. When you are still in the halo of New Year's Day, the year feels new and young and everything seems possible. We have visions of our new selves, sometime later in the year, all fit, healthier, and with our new habits firmly ensconced in our new selves.

Here in the writer world, many a new habit boils down to writing more. Finish the book. Finish the story. Finish anything. Back in December, I realized that I had not been setting aside time to write. That had become the norm, the habit that was hard to break (ba-dum-dum ching!) I decided to try an experiment: write something, ANYthing, each day. And I've succeeded. As of last night, I've written something, anything of fiction for 64 straight days. What's great and most important to me is the inner urge. It's not back at the full blazing glory I've previously experienced in my writing life, but the pilot light is lit.

There the the flip side, the downside to what I've been doing. Often, I've not taken the time to write until late at night. Once it's past 11, if I'm not writing something I've already planned out--typical for these 64 days--I am in no mood to create. Thus, I'll satisfy my daily duty/habit by writing the bare minimum, around 100 words or a long paragraph. That is no way to get anything done, but it's becoming a habit.

And that's where course correction comes in. I think many of us start a resolution or a habit without a good idea of how to ingrain the habit within us. We fail at our resolutions by the end of January, get mad at ourselves, sigh, and go back to the way it was in December.

But don't forget February. The second month of the year is, in many ways, more crucial than January. It's the time where you can readjust your outlook on your resolutions. Knocking out soft drinks cold turkey too much for you and the failure has already happened? Try cutting back one a week. That's not hard. Then, after a bit, keep another sugary drink on the shelf and out of your stomach. That new story/novel you've thought about and shelved in the internal file cabinet in your mind? Get it out of your head and onto pixel or paper. Chances are you can salvage something.

You see, by February, the year is no longer new. The real world has crept in. You've lived life in the new year, with new challenges to overcome. February is that time where you can see what's not working and fix it. Oh, and the beauty of the months March through December? You can course correct anytime. I just find February to be the best time.

And for me and my new "habit" of writing the barest minimum to for the right to put a red "X" on a calendar? Yes, I've started writing again. No, it's not very good or very productive. It's not working the way I wanted it to. Okay, then, what can I do to change it so that I can continue to move forward? Course correction. Or, to put it another way, the first, big obstacle. Overcome it, and things get much easier, or, rather, manageable.

February. The Month for Course Corrections. Your second chance at resolutions. It doesn't have all the romance that resolutions have in January, but they tend to have more real-world experience with which you can get those resolutions completed.

My course correction for writing is simple: make my time to write be at an hour before the last thing I do every night. Find that secret, special time where I can bust out multiple paragraphs in the space of 15 minutes. And then do it again. Double my effort. In the daylight, if at all possible.

Are there any course corrections y'all are planning to make to better accomplish your resolutions?

Of Resolutions and Metrics

by
Scott D. Parker

The first week of January always brings with it a ray of sunshine for the new year. The old year is sloughed off like dead skin from a snake, the new year is laid out before us, ready to be lived in and experienced. And, more importantly, to be sculpted into a shape we prefer. Thus, we each take a deep, cool breath, let it out, and start forging ahead into the river of a new year with our various resolutions as the buoys keeping us afloat.

We all have them. Earlier this week, John and Russell wrote about looking ahead to 2011. I’m here to give my own personal spin on the resolution thing. I get dreadfully pedantic when it comes to resolutions. They need to be realistic and measurable. “Eating better” is not a resolution. “Losing ten pounds by June” is. You can measure the latter. The former is too vague and invites failure.

To have any hope of coming to fruition, resolutions need metrics. How might you lose ten pounds by June? Start with something easy--cutting out the soft drink at lunch--and then gradually move towards other metrics--start walking after work each day. Moreover, keep a streak calendar. I’ve come to rely on streak calendars to measure my progress of my resolutions. It’s a simple exercise: for every day you performed one of your metrics for a resolution, make it off with something close to a big, red X. You string a few of those along and, soon, the thrill of keeping the chain unbroken because more fun than you missing out on Dr. Pepper at noon. For y'all with an iPod/iPhone, I suggest the one I use: Streaks.

Yo, Scott, you’re saying. This is a writing blog, dude. What the heck are you doing getting all Dr. Oz on us? Well, I’m making a point, about myself (you, too?) and about writing. As those of y’all who read my column before our little blog here was overrun with a bunch of fun, noiry tales of yuletide mischief, I had a bad writing year in 2010. It sucked. Much like the defense of the Houston Texans, when you’re at the bottom, there really is only one way to go. That may be true, however, but I still want metrics.

We love books. We write them and we read them. I basically failed in both categories last year. Let me back-up. I didn’t fail in my reading because anything I read, I want to read and I don’t apologize for it. I noticed a trend in last year’s reading, two really. One, I didn’t read as many books in 2010 as I did in 2009. Since I basically blog about every book I read, I was able to count twenty-one books I read last year. That may be good for some, but I can state with certainty that, of the three people in my house, it was I that read the fewest books. Me, the "writer."

Of those, nine were “old” books: Tarzan, Cool and Lam, War of the Worlds, etc. Not apologizing because they were dang fine reads. I read an additional five or so graphic novels, leaving around seven (don’t do the math; I’m remembering more books as I write) “New” books--books published last year or in the previous few. Some were mystery (Stephen Cannell’s latest; the newest Richard Castle book, Naked Heat) while others were not (Perdido Street Station, by far my favorite book of the year; Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw, simple the most fun audiobook I listened to last year). If I’m in the business of knowing what’s going on in the present, I simply have to read more modern books in 2011.

Reading resolution for 2011: read more than seven new books. I’ve re-upped with New Mystery Reader.com and I’ve already got a book in the hopper. Add to that a couple of books by fellow DSDers and I’m already starting January out good.

Writing-wise, well, this is the true Everest for me. If I want to call myself a writer, I simply must produce more fiction. When I’m asked this year the question I dreaded last year (“What are you working on?”), I want to be able to proudly list all the projects I’ve got going on. One metric is short stories. I wrote a paltry two last year, one was published and the other was not. True, that’s a 50% publication rate, but it’s cheating. And I’m not counting the one collaboration I started last year. That’s going on 2010’s books even though I’ll be finishing it in 2011.

Short story resolution for 2011: write more than two stories and submit them.

Then we come to the biggie: the novel. As much as I love my first novel, I’ve not completed a second. I’ve written enough words over multiple projects to have completed a second book, but I still haven’t written “The End” on a finished project. That will end this year, with a simple, measurable, metric.

Novel resolution for 2011: finish my second novel by Bouchercon in September.

Oh, and attend Bouchercon, too. I’ve given lots of thought these past couple of months about writing style and writing schemes. I’m not quite ready to state my scheme; I’ll save that for a future entry. I’m probably going to join a critique group again so I’ll have that weekly pressure test and accountability. And, of course, I’m telling all of y’all.

There you go. It’s out there, my resolutions and metrics. I hope y’all keep me on my toes and feel free to ask me about them if I don’t write about them. These are daunting tasks for me, but shouldn't be if I aim to call myself an author.

What are some resolutions for y'all?

Item of the Week: I seriously love JT Ellison’s Wine of the Week feature at the end of her blog posts over at Murderati. With a nod to her, I’m adapting it here. I’m just going to put a little something that I’ve experienced, eaten, listened to, watched, or whatever since last Saturday.

First up: Iron and Wine’s new album. NPR Music has the audio and video of the band performing their new album, “Kiss Each Other Clean,” in its entirety. Just yesterday, I listened to it three times. Excellent music and the live setting brings out lots of nuances amid the music and the lyrics. Come 25 January, this CD will be in my iPod.