New Year's Resolutions & Blogging in 2015

Happy New Year! For anyone out partying last night I hope you had a good time, and don't feel too worse for wear this morning. At this time of year, like many people I like to come up with some New Year's Resolutions to help me get what I want out of the year ahead. Also like many people I'm not overly good at sticking to them, but I'm going to give it a go anyway.

Photo by Trey Ratcliff

I read earlier this week some advice from an article in The Times newspaper about how to increase your chances of sticking to your new year resolutions. The advice was to sleep more and to pick just one resolution. Scientific studies have clearly shown that getting a decent amount of quality sleep each night improves your focus and resolve, allowing you greater willpower to do what you set out to do. Apparently 60% of people who slept well were still on course with their resolutions by the end of January, compared to 44% of those who didn't get a good night's sleep. The other bit of advice is to only choose one resolution, presumably as it is so much easier to only have one thing to focus on.

I am going to try and get plenty of sleep, but I'm not quite going to manage the second piece of advice. I am going to come close however, and choose just three goals, which are:

1. To be less busy
2. To read more
3. To write more

How, you may ask, can you be less busy while doing more? Well I'm going to try to streamline a bit more, make the most of the time I have and focus on the things I really do want to do, leaving some of the other things aside. I always have too many interests and have a go at all sorts of different things, flitting from one to the other. By being more focused, I can do more of the things I really want to do.

Read more is fairly obvious, and if I'm a little less busy, I hopefully can make more time to read. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I read half the number of books in 2014 than I did in 2013, which given the sheer number and variety of books I really want to read, is something of a disappointment. On Goodreads I'm going to aim for 50 books again this year, which is what I read in 2013. Lets see how I get on...

Writing more is something I've had on my New Year Resolutions in many a year. This year though, I'm starting the year more resolved that this is something I want to focus on in 2015. I want to write regularly on my blog, so I am setting myself the realistic goal of a blog post a week on average which I think is very achievable. But there's lots more I want to write. In the last couple of months I've been exploring writing fiction again for the first time in a long, long time, and since the end of October I've written four short stories, which is four more than I managed in at least the five years previous. I'm under no illusions that they're any good, but its a start. So I'm hoping to write more fiction this year, and perhaps submit a few short stories to magazines and competitions if I think any are good enough. Beyond that, I'll see how it goes...

A November Writing Challenge

Sorry for the long delay - almost a month - since my last post. It's been kind of a busy October, packed weekends and my boss at week taking a three weeks off for a Caribbean Cruise leading me to be rather busy. Hopefully November should be different though...

I've done quite a bit of writing over the last few years, articles, blog posts and the like, but I haven't done any fiction writing for more than five years. It was a decision I took because I was mostly reading non-fiction at the time, and so writing non-fiction made most sense. However these days I'm mostly reading fiction, and I've been itching to get back to having a go at fiction again. It's November, and so I could do NanoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, for anyone that doesn't know, is a writing challenge each year where you aim to write 50,000 words of a novel in November. However, I don't think it is the best starting point for a return to fiction writing. Even if I achieved it, I'd have a half finished, really crap novel. I don't have any illusions about this. I wasn't a particularly good writer of fiction in the first place, I'm sure I'm a lot worse now. But with practice I can get better - I hope.

So for this November, I'm doing my own challenge. I'm going to try and write four short stories this month, one a week. Each story will probably be between two and five thousand words. This will help me get back into writing, and if by some chance I think any of them are half decent I can always submit them for publication (otherwise I'll probably just publish them on here). I've got a few ideas, but I've not fixed on all the stories to write yet, except that a couple of them will be science fiction, one or two won't be. I'm planning the first now, hopefully will start writing tomorrow. It's a historical fiction story for a competition. More details soon.

642 Things to Write About

While browsing in Waterstones bookshop at the weekend, I found '642 Things to Write About' and just had to have it. It is a book of ideas for writing, along with the space to write in. Of course, I mostly write on a computer these days, but there's still something magicial and putting pen to paper, and this book really encourages that. So I'll probably start off writing in the book, then switch to the computer if it's a longer piece.

This book was written, if you can call it that, by the San Fransisco Writer's Grotto. Basically the editor asked them all to submit via email some ideas to get the creative juices flowing, and that's just what they did. They range from random short prompts such as 'A bad smell and where it came from' and 'Pen an ode to an onion' to longer ideas that may be the basis for a story. An example of this: 'Find a world map or globe, close your eyes, pick a spot. Write about a person arriving there for the first time. I think one of the ones I'm going to do first is 'Write a letter to go in a time capsule to be buried in your garden and not opened for 500 years'. Wow. What would you include in a letter like that? The amount of space you get after each writing prompt - while not enough a lot of the time - is comensurate with whether the idea is big or small etc.

The book has a really nice feel to it, with a very stiff card cover and nicely thick pages. It is a book that just makes you want to write in it.

I've not written any fiction in a long time, years in fact, having written mostly articles for the last few years now. I'm starting to consider having a go at writing fiction again soon though, and this may be just what I need to get started. I may even post some of them on here.