I posted my perennial New Year’s resolutions from the previous post at the NaNoWriMo Big, Fun, Scary Goal Center forum, and decided they were too vague, so I added some detail on some of them, and admitted that others were unrealistic (at least for this year!):
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Some of these require more specificity. I want to get my 5K time down below 20 minutes, which is not so terribly far from my PR in both 2006 and 2007 of 20:26, but will certainly take some concentrated effort.
Language skills. I have been teaching myself Spanish off and on for a couple of years, and plan to do a little more with that this year, but this is actually my lowest priority goal this year.
Go back to TKD: I just registered myself and my daughter for Family TKD at the Y, and I think my wife and son will end up joining the class, too. Perfect! Also, this helps with “spend more time with the kids.”
If we buy a piano this year, I will learn to play at least one Billy Joel song.
Writing: a couple of weeks ago, when I started my blog, I said that my writing goals for 2008 were: keep up with the blog, write one professional article and one short story before NaNoWriMo 2008, and win NaNo. I’m having to modify those goals slightly because I started hashing out a novel the other day. So now my new writing goals are: keep up with the blog, write one professional article and the first draft of my current novel before NaNoWriMo 2008, and win NaNo.
I will not grow taller.
Learn to draw: again, probably not this year.
Superpowers: I plan to go up at least one belt level in TKD this year — that and breaking 20 minutes for a 5K would be superpowers enough for 2008.
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So, yeah, I started work on a novel on January 2. I’m such an idiot. I don’t know what I was thinking — I had a plan, and the plan did not involve working on a novel until November, which was comfortably far off. But an idea I’ve been kicking around occasionally since I was in high school more than 20 years ago popped back into my head with a new angle that I couldn’t resist thinking through. That’s the problem with ideas — once you get one idea and start going in a new direction (such as, “I’m going to start writing fiction again”), you can’t help but get flooded with ideas related to it. This isn’t NaNo, though — I don’t have that kind of tight deadline, although I’d like to finish the first draft of this novel before I have to start a new one for NaNo.
The Unfocused Life 