New Year's Resolutions

     It comes up every New Year's Eve.  What is your New Year's Resolution?  Well, I prefer to not make New Year's Resolutions, which I will now refer to as NYR.  First of all, has anyone actually ever kept one?  NYRs are made to be broken.  Just because it is a new year, does that mean you have to start fresh? What if you are very happy with how things are going.  Do I need to wait until the new year to start fresh?  Why not start with goals for what you would like to accomplish in the next year, month, week or even day?
    I was riding in the 'way back' of the minivan on January 8th, not the 1st, when I decided to write down some goals for the year.  Some are big, some are small and others are teeny, tiny baby steps to bigger goals.  One was to start a blog.  Check.  It took two weeks to really do it.  That's actually pretty good for me.  I do like to procrastinate.  Or we could call it "marathon planning sessions strategically timed to prolong the actual event."  Some may also call it "planning it to death." Either way I'm pretty good at it.
    Another one of my goals was to finish the two articles that I am writing for an on-line writing gig.  I wanted to finish them before the end of January.  There's still time.  I also want to write a book.  I have a great topic and it needs a lot of research.  There will also be quite a few interviews to conduct.  I am really excited to get started.  I am in the planning stages and I am searching for my interview subjects.  I was pleasantly surprised when I opened an email this morning from a lady who saw an article I wrote about her mother. She is the daughter to one of the 'characters' in the book I am going to write.  Don't you love it when they find you?  How cool is that?
    I would like to find a magazine or two to write for as a free-lancer to add to my credits as a free-lance correspondent for our local newspaper. I also love to write poetry, so I decided that I would write a poem for every week in the year.  That's 52 poems!  I got the idea from The Starving Writer website (see the link at the right).  They had a poetry contest last April (National Poetry Month).  One poem per day using their daily prompts.  We had all of May to clean up the poems and we submitted the lot at the beginning of June.  I did it just for fun, I never thought about actually winning.  Guess what?  I won!  They took 13 of my poems and made a chapbook out of them.  I received a box of them just after Christmas.  We decided to call it "Just For Fun."  So one poem a week doesn't seem like much until you add them up.  With no goal, how many would I have?  Probably not 52+.  By sharing these goals on here, I feel a little more confident that I will have to follow through, even if no one is really watching. I'll probably add some new goals as I accomplish these, and I don't think I'll wait for 'new year's' to do it.