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.

We're Not Going to Make it to 2012

In fact, our world has just about 15 months remaining. D-day falls in the spring of 2011, though I haven't taken the time to calculate the exact date. That will become apparent as time passes.

I can understand why you might be skeptical. There have, after all, been a lot of false alarms. And if you're inclined to believe in a doomsday prophecy, 2012 has a lot going for it. It's not just a trendy, flash-in-the-pan sort of end-of-the-world philosophy. It's been around for centuries, and has the (theoretical) backing of some pretty smart people (who aren't around to jump up onto soap boxes and take to the Internet yelling, "Wait...WAIT! That's not what we meant AT ALL!"). It even had a successful box office run.

But I have proof:


I know this probably isn't what you thought the Doomsday Clock would look like. You might have imagined it black, for instance. You probably thought it would be bigger. You may not have envisioned sticky fingerprints. And I'm almost sure you didn't expect it to be branded by a national test prep company. But be honest: haven't a lot of things in life worked out quite a bit differently than you'd expected?

Back in January of 2008, I went to work on a special project at Kaplan, a project that (I can now tell you, though it was top secret then) launched on August 7, 2008. Shortly after I started, I received the "countdown clock" you see pictured above. It was running backward, counting down the then (roughly) 200 days until our launch. And let me tell you, it ran fast. Nothing like watching the tenths-of-a-second spin backward when you're on a deadline.

I actually really enjoyed the countdown clock but, like all good things, it came to an end. August 7, 2008 arrived. All of the numbers on the clock hit zero. It flashed zeroes for a day and then, on August 8, it was a regular clock, running in the right direction.

Or so it appeared. Of course, I now know that it was simply dormant, awaiting the right moment to share its true message with the world. One morning I looked at the clock and it was running backward again, racing toward a new, unexplained date that hadn't been programmed in by some corporate project manager.

451 days.

Use them wisely.