New Year's Resolutions for 2013

A few days ago, I found myself thinking about New Year's Resolutions. More specifically, I didn't know what to do for mine. I make one every year, usually failing early on in the year, but never really know what to do. It's a force of habit making one, with the special psychological effect of it seeming significant, even when it's not.

So, I Googled it.

As it turns out, there are common New Year's Resolutions - lose weight, give up smoking, travel, etc. - and the one big thing that lets people down? Specificity. I wrote about this on Tumblr, but the gist of it is this: if we're not specific about our Resolutions (instead of lose weight, lose a pound a week, for example) then we're much more likely to fail.

With that in mind, I thought about last year's New Year's Resolution, for 2012. I wanted to write every day. In fairness, this went quite well for some time, until I became too damn exhausted to think about what to write, and I gave up on journalling my days. That's two things I could have done but didn't, and as a result: failure.

That doesn't mean my Resolution was too ambitious. Far from it. I just didn't have my head wrapped around it properly. So for 2013, I plan on writing every single day, without fail, but with some specific help. I have a list on my wall on a sheet of yellow paper, right in my line of vision at all times, of seven things I can write, if I can't think of anything. That's seven categories, mind you, not seven items. In order, they are:

1. A blog post,
2. A poem,
3. A flash story,
4. 500 words of a novella,
5. 500 words of an article,
6. A video script, and
7. 500 words of a non-fiction book.

Going by my schedule, the first three are to be posted every week - on Monday, Wednesday and Friday respectively - and everything else is an added bonus. I have more detail per point on the poster, but the main thing is that there are options available to me.

Click the appropriate link:

In the US or Ireland?: 

In the UK? 

To make the articles easier to write, I haven't left myself without some help. In a green envelope on my desk, right underneath the poster, there are assignment cards (on coloured paper, don't you know). Each assignment is a word or phrase, with space to plan (roughly) around that word. When the article(s) per assignment are written, the assignment then goes into the red envelope on my desk. Why? Think of it like traffic lights: green to go, red to stop.

So far, I have 40 cards in the envelope, but I have a whole list of topics I still have to put onto card to add in. What this boils down to is more than one assignment per week, if I so chose to write articles all the time, by the time I actually put everything onto cards. All of these assignments, however, are based on one thing: writing. I have ideas for other areas of interest that aren't in the envelope, because I want to be able to write them without chance being involved.

Yes, chance. I won't know until I take out an assignment what it will be. I have five different colours of paper in the envelope, so currently eight assignments per colour. That's already more than enough for me to forget what's written on what colour paper. I can't choose at all. I did that so I wouldn't get caught up thinking I have to write an article about something, even if I didn't especially want to.

Not all of these articles will make it online, of course. Being split as they are into subjects, I could easily choose to make the topics parts of a book. This enables me to keep focused, and should encourage me to keep writing from the green envelope every day I find myself stuck for something to write about.

Writer's Block, you can consider yourself vanquished.

So, there it is, my New Year's Resolution, and how I plan to kick it's ass. 2013 is going to be a busy year, that's for sure, but I think my Resolution is definitely manageable.

What about you? What are you doing for New Year's?

Freedom and Conquest

The great gift of literature is its examination of the world we never knew. Preserved in time from the moment the words reach the public, we are given a looking glass through which we can see the worlds of freedom and conquest in the history of humankind, from the white woman who 'knows her place' to the black nation that succumbs to an idea by a great Caucasian empire.

I generally love the idea of getting to discover the trials and tribulations of our race through literature. In preparation for my exams, I found myself studying The Awakening and Heart of Darkness, two radically different stories. One tells us of freedom, the other of colonialism, and neither paints a very good picture. What should have been a life of joy and creativity turns to a life of extremism, loneliness and desperation.

It doesn't paint a great picture of an artist, does it? Free from a repressive relationship, genuinely successful enough to live on her own, and still unhappy.

Or how about the Brit that got away? Takes a nation by the horns and ends up dead.

Neither freedom not conquest end well, not in these cases. It poses a question for life: are we better to conquer or to escape? It comes down to the context of our lives, and how we plan on getting by.

Edna flees a life she was never happy with it. She does it boldly and bravely, but with a knowledge that she had a gift she could earn from. Even with company, even with this gift, however, Edna must come to a realisation: in running away from everything she once knew, she has no way of surviving when her last safe-guard falls apart.

Kurtz, on the other hand, rules with an iron fist. And where did that get him? Right... not very far. Just like Edna, he finds himself an early grave in a heat of madness, taken too far from the life he once knew.

Is there a middle ground between freedom and conquest? I imagine there is, but it seems difficult to tell how one might tackle the world without going insane. Alone, separated from the world we know, what chance do we really stand?

While we might take baby-steps online into the great unknown, there are some that take bigger steps and leave altogether. They escape to America, or Canada, or Australia, and they live a new life, working in a new industry or trying to make it alone. Others simply run with no end in sight, trying to be free. The unfortunate nature of freedom, however, is that it has particularly isolating qualities. In the loneliness of the great unknown, be it freedom or conquest, the odds are against us.

Can we simply hide in the books and learn from life that way?

Something tells me that there's more to us than that, to some of us at least, and the great dangers of the ever unknown and the horrors that await can only be found in the action of leaving. But leaving alone? It remains to be seen whether, as a people, we can survive. The social animal in us doesn't know how to breathe loneliness.

The suffocating madness doesn't seem worth it, and I suppose that's why I keep my friends close when I write. While I may be at home, while I may be safe, there's still that loneliness that likes to creep up. The simple thought that there are people somehow involved in the process before it begins somehow makes it less terrifying to embark on a journey into the unknown. That's just my way of reconciling my dream with the reality, before I face the horror (the horror).