1.01.2021

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 284 – Jan 1, 2021 New Year's Resolution

 


Happy New Year!

We are still here on our island as the spectral page of the calendar turns away from our nemesis year 2020, to open the kind and healing annum that 2021 promises to be. As always, nothing magical occurred at the turn of the year, although I have seldom heard such insistent and angry fireworks as those which greeted the midnight hour this morning. All I can feel is the vaguest sense that on the horizon we can see the signs of a mainland and possible a causeway. We’ll give the year a little more time before giving up and going back into our holes.

Last year on this date, I embarked on a rather reasonable New year’s Resolution – to write each day for 365. I didn’t set any constraints on what the writing would look like or how much time I should spend. Just put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and create something.

I’m pleased to report that I did well. I missed a few days for illness and a couple for travel (if you can remember what that was). I was helped along by the sheer emptiness of much of the spring and summer, and also by a profession that is starting to provide me with commissions and projects. This may be the best I have ever done in terms of keeping a resolution.

I’m not sure whether any of them are achievements, but in the course of my year of writing I have completed one Picaresque novel manuscript, seven short stories (some of which do not involve dragons), a noir mystery in haiku format, a handful of poems (which have been locked up and will never be read again), three children’s books (one in Spanish, no less), a presentation essay about Heroes and about 75 Island Notes. I tossed in a hundred or so private journal entries for fun.

I believe that writing is muscle memory. Like running (so I’m told). If we start out with small fragments, then eventually we will have a collected body of work – it could be a 10K race or perhaps a novel. The next leap of faith will be to find something to do with all those words.

I sense my new New Year’s Resolution.