A New Year Indeed

Honestly, I wasn't all that optimistic about 2012. It wasn't that we'd been warned that the world would end--that seems to happen all the time. And it wasn't that by the end of the year I'd been unemployed for more than three months. I'm bizarrely unconcerned about that. It might have been in part due to the fact that I was sick for both Christmas and New Year's Eve, we didn't have any snow for the holidays and when 2012 began it seemed like there was a lot of unfinished 2011 business hanging on. And it was partly, I'm sure, due to the state of the world. When most new years dawn, I'm thinking about what the year ahead holds for me and my family. This year, more than most, I was thinking about what 2012 would hold for the country and the world; my expectations on those fronts were pretty bleak. That's still true.

But something changed for me with the new year, something I didn't plan for or resolve about or even anticipate.

2012 became the year to finish all of those dangling projects of the past, to clear out my filing cabinets and find a home for whatever was in them, to clean house not by tossing things and donating things as I usually do but by following a thousand paths mapped out in the past and interrupted or abandoned.

For example:

• In November of 2006, I wrote a romance novel on the train. I did it for no reason other than that a lot of women I knew were participating in NaNoWriMo and I wanted to find out whether I could write an entire novel in a month. Because I had a full time job and a 2+ hour round-trip commute and was a single parent, I didn't have a lot of time to write...but I managed to wrap up that novel largely during my commute (by train) that month. Then I basically let it sit on my hard drive for five years. During the first week of the year, I reviewed it, proofread it and added about 5,000 words; then I uploaded it to the Amazon Kindle store.
• During that same week, I vetted the children's books my daughter and I had written together during her early childhood--books that have been sitting around much longer than that romance novel had. These, in fact, only existed in hard copy. I picked the two we wanted to publish first, sent one off to get a quote from an illustrator I'm super-excited to be working with, and set Tori about making illustration notes on the second.
• This week, I finished creating e-book files, uploading them to my website and creating Paypal code and then created a sales page for my law school admissions e-books. Mike Gifford turned that content into an actual web page for me and added it to my site this evening.

I have two freelance projects to wrap up over the weekend, so that's probably it for this week, but really...I can't wait to see what next week holds.