author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Well, Happy New Year, everybody. How was yours? I hope like heck it did not involve RAGING WILDFIRES. Because I have it on good authority that those suck.

(In case you were wondering and/or were worried, John and I are fine. We're a few miles north of the areas that were evacuated for the Marshall Fire, so our home was never in any concrete danger. THIS TIME. It had been so dry this winter, with very little measurable snowfall right up to the end of the year, that any spark could ignite the next catastrophe. We were fortunate to be spared this time around. We are also extremely aware that fortune today doesn't guarantee fortune tomorrow. It's kinda sobering to think about.)

I have a bunch of things to blog about over the next few days. Today I think I'm going to blog about New Year's Non-Resolutions.

I don't really make New Year's Resolutions. They strike me mostly as an opportunity to set myself up to fail. So much of the tradition seems to involve enumerating all the ways I suck, scolding myself for them, and attempting to be a person who sucks less. This is perhaps an ungenerous way of looking at the New Year's Resolution tradition. It is nevertheless representative of the tradition's historical role in my life.

But I do have some small changes to make to my day-to-day routine and to my self-expectations that, I hope, will make me, if not a less sucky person, then a happier person, someone who approaches the daily work without so much dread and self-recrimination.

I'm making some small changes to my schedule. I'll be expecting less from myself on those days when I know I'll have less to give. I'll be reserving more time for those goals that have gotten shortchanged in that respect of late. And I'll be reevaluating my relationship with writing with a focus on why I write.

This blog post by Chuck Wendig brought that into sharp relief for me: "Writer's Resolution, 2022: The Necessary Act Of Selfishly Seeking Joy"

I think we get caught up in the process, in the product, and we forget to identify and embrace those parts of writing that bring us true satisfaction and happiness. We started writing for some reason or another, and it's easy to lose a hold on that reason.

It's been a good long while since I read Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, but one of the bits that stands out fresh and sharp in my memory is the image of the author leaping out of bed in his eagerness to start the day's writing. And wow do I envy that. It's more common for me to wake up in a state of dread, knowing that all those things I blithely planned the day before have now come due, and I'm not ready. I'm just not ready.

I've often blogged about, complained about, lamented and griped about, my constant struggle with avoidance--with the difficulty of simply sitting down and getting started. And I have several strategies that can help with that, depending on the day. Co-writing sessions and their pressure to be punctual and productive. The "I'll just" method of replacing the Big Scary Task with a smaller, less threatening task ("Instead of revising the story, I'll just open the file and reread the current draft."). Letting external and internal deadlines convince me that I gotta do the thing regardless of whether I wanna.

But I wanna wanna. That's the whole point. Strategies for convincing myself to do the thing that I don't wanna do, they all sort of ignore that the whole root of the problem is that very don't wanna in the first place.

Instead of looking forward to writing, I'm dreading it. What a sad place for one's lifetime ambition to live!

I would like 2022 to be the year of remembering, in specific and sensory detail, all the reasons why I originally decided to be a writer. Why I wanted to write. Why making up stories and playing with words made me excited and happy. I'd like to recognize the moments when I do genuinely look forward to writing, and pay attention to how that feels, and why I'm feeling it, and see if there's some sort of anchor or trigger for that feeling that I can deploy at will.

And I want to explore the reasons for the dread, too. Like, what am I really dreading? Not writing itself, surely. What experience am I afraid of having? What unpleasantness am I assuming will be part of the writing process that maybe doesn't have to be?

I don't expect to 100% solve the problem of avoidance this way. But I'm hoping to mitigate it. I think that's reasonable.

Whatever I figure out, or even whatever I'm trying to figure out, you'll no doubt hear about it here. So, er, buckle up, I guess?