New Year, New Schedule

Happy new year! It’s taken me this long to settle in to my regular routine again after the holidays, and I’m not sure I’m there even yet. But I’m working on it.

I’m not a resolution kind of person, exactly. But I do find the quiet days between Boxing Day and New Year’s, and between New Year’s and the first day of school, some of the best of the year for reflecting on the things I’ve been working on and the year to come. I suppose those days feel a bit like I’ve hit the pause button. They’re quiet, without the busy socializing of the actual holidays, but also without the demands of my regular routine, and I tend to spend a fair bit of time in my head, assessing and looking ahead. And eating chocolate. There’ s no denying a lot of chocolate gets eaten during those days.

But this past week, it was back to work and back to routine. And back, of course, to writing. I’ve set some pretty frightening goals for my writing year, given all the things other than writing that demand my time. I’ve talked here before about my Yahtzee-like schedule. Today, I finally sat down and made one for all of 2014. This time, I didn’t just do the daily word count part, but also added sections for bigger goals for each of the projects I’m working on (ie MS1: 10k, 20k, 30k and so on), so that I can keep track not only of what I want to accomplish this year, but of how those daily words add up to bigger achievements. It’s important, I think, to make note of our own successes. And for the first time, I also added in the other writing-related things I want to do this year, including places to indicate I’d written a blog post or sent a piece of snail mail (more on that in another post). It’s daunting, looking at it. So much so that I actually cringe when I see it and don’t want to look directly at it for fear of being entirely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work ahead. But that’s the inherent beauty of this kind of schedule: I don’t have to look at the magnitude. All I have to do today is fill in that one little box. Just one. That’s all. I can do that.