Collapsing into the New Year

Enough Cheerleading Already

Sunset, Cozumel

Let’s Dissolve into the New Year

I spent the new year not resolving, but rather dissolving into relaxation. I haven’t been on a vacation in several years for the reasons people typically miss vacation— spending too much money on home repairs, having family members who need care, etc.

I had the great fortune to go to Cozumel for more than a week, to spend days looking at the ocean and sunsets, to go snorkeling, to read a lot. And to get a massage. (Alright, two massages—trying to work out the neck, shoulder and arm pain that periodically flares since a car going 80 mph rammed my stationary vehicle fifteen years ago. Air travel exacerbates the problem.) 

I needed that break much more than I needed to beat myself up with fitness, weight loss, and writing goals. My sister invited several family members and provided the housing on the beach. The opportunity to see both my sisters for some part of each day for a week was lovely, especially as we are all still slammed by the death of one of our brothers. 

Now that I’m back, my husband jokes that we can no longer buy prescription drugs at a restaurant. (We didn’t buy any--but it was funny to see signs listing all sorts of prescription drugs for sale everywhere.) What I’m now thinking of is how I might form a creative routine that benefits my mental/emotional state. I wasn’t able to start many new pieces of writing in 2023 because:

• Too many family members and very dear friends have died in close succession over the past several years and the effect has been cumulative.

• The world is on fire and I’m not sure my work makes a difference. The muse has threatened to abandon sluggish me although I did write two short stories that I’m proud of.

I DID do a lot of workshopping and revising, and for me that counts because it’s a hell of a lot of work. 

I’m not going to make any fitness goals because I already walk my dogs 3-4 miles almost every day and I participate in a Pilates class twice a week. I am fat, but my doctor doesn’t bug me because my cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure are all normal without medication. I visited the doctor a week before my vacation to get a cortisone shot for my shoulder. (It usually works, but not this time, thus the massages mentioned above). At that visit, my blood pressure was 110/60. “Not bad for someone in her mid-sixties who’s thinking about getting some deep shots momentarily,” I said to the doctor. “It’s actually great,” she replied. 

What I’ll do instead: 

• Lazing around for more than a week resulted in my fingernails growing without breaking, so I am resolved to paint them this week before I have to do any cleaning (which will break them, despite gloves). 

• Attend an accountability group several mornings each week. I joined this group recently and it’s great for me. Without setting a ‘super goal,’ I can just set a goal each time I join the others. In this way, I’ve been able to write posts like this one, write two stories, and partially revise my passion project (a novel on friendship and book censorship in a public high school). 

• Write a short story I’ve been thinking about. It hasn’t exactly been developing in my head so much as wandering there, a bit lost. I haven’t started it not only because too much is depressing but also because I don’t see it as marketable. And by marketable, I don’t mean there’s no money in it—if I required money from my writing, I would have starved long ago. It may not be marketable in the sense that it may not have a good chance of being published (i.e., I’m not sure where it fits). 

• Continue to revise my novel.

• Try to figure out how I can market my upcoming YA novel about a girl escaping a polygamist cult. (If you know of any good advice out there on writers-who-are-terrible-at-social-media getting the word out, please send me links and info!)

• Beg the muse to come back and give me ideas about my dive-into-Irish-mythology novel.

Something to Actually Make You Feel Good

If the New Year’s inspiration you are receiving feels toxic/makes you feel self-loathing because you know you aren’t going to meet the suggested goal, try this week’s 

Men Yell at Me

by

lyz

Lenz. She puts the “New Year, New You” in its place. 🙂

Library News and Book Banning News 

Yes, there’s some bad news on this front, but here’s a round-up that includes a lot of good news:

Fighting Back Against Book Bans: 'It's an Act of Resistance.' | Censorship News | School Library Journal

Not Library News, but censorship talk--The Smothers Brothers

I was sad to learn of the death of Tommy Smothers. When I was a child we watched the brothers’ variety show. I remember one thing that must have contributed to them being fired and losing that show.They were doing a skit in which politicians threw their hats into the ring as presidential candidates. When it came to President LB Johnson, they threw in a crown. Such mild stuff when you think about it. 

What I’m Reading

Hello Beautiful

I finished Hello Beautiful. It has all the feels about family love, family fighting, holding pointless grudges, etc. And shows how a family that loves one another can draw in and help someone who had no family (at least none that loved him). As a writer, I was looking at character development that I might learn from. Ultimately, the characters were not developed in a way I want to imitate. FYI--Tiffany Yates Martin wrote a great post for Jane Friedman’s newsletter this week, ​The Über Skill for Writers​. It discusses why, in reviewing a book, saying it is good or bad has no value. Instead, we need to understand what we like and talk about the book in those terms. I like character development that moves forward rather than looks back at why someone did something earlier in the novel. Since a lot of Hello Beautiful has actions and then looks back to mention why they happened that way, it was a tough one for me. 

The War of Art

The War of Art: Break through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield. This title is more than a decade old, but I’d seen it mentioned three times recently, so I picked it up at the library. It’s a quick read and I found some good advice there. It talks about resistance as the force that keeps creatives from working (sort of a broad sense of procrastination). And the more important an action is to our soul or development, the most resistance there is. 

Pressfield believes in literal muses, which he thinks of as angels, “invisible psychic forces that support and sustain us in our journey toward ourselves” (106). Not everyone I know would agree with this, but the section on paying attention to inspiration is interesting and creatives will find it helpful. 

Emptying the Nest

Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes by

Morgan Baker

. I like to read books from smaller presses¹, and I happened upon Emptying the Nest because Morgan Baker is online in some groups I hang with. It was a perfect fit for me--quilts, dogs, and grown-up kids. While it’s about the sense a mom has of losing her children when they go away to college, it’s more than that. Baker’s elder daughter has food allergies that can send her into anaphylactic shock and cause death. So Baker had more than the usual concern about what would happen when her daughter wasn’t under her care. The departure caused her to struggle with depression (another connection for me), but she learned to work through the challenges that letting go brings. 

***

I read more magazines on the plane while a very sick and unmasked young man sitting next to me sneezed, coughed, blew his nose and hocked up balls of snots. But overall, what a great trip.

1. I also read from the major presses, as you can see. I have FOMO, so I check newspaper bestseller lists, but also enjoy Lit Hub’s weekly book review bulletin, Book Marks Bulletin, which has the week’s top books and connects to several reviews of each.