Oh Yeah New Year's Resolutions: 2010 Report Card

I just had two last year:

Keep an activity log

This was surprisingly difficult, given that all I had to do was write down a date and ten or twelve words about what I'd done that day. I kept up with it fairly well through until mid-June, then started to fall apart (ironically, just about when I was most doing the kind of creative stuff that the activity log was supposed to track.) Around August I tried to back-fill July and made a stab at keeping up through August. In September I gave up. Well, "stopped" would be more accurate, since it was more I-keep-forgetting than a conscious I-don't-want-to. At the end of of November, I started again and have kept it up since.

So the grade here would be around 8.5 months out of 12, for a C-.

Do some marathons

This was in the creative sense. I did the following:

* January: 30in30 -- ladyperegrine and I did the 30in30 challenge together, with a goal of each producing thirty art cards. I actually did this. And even traded one of them. Yay! This put me on an art binge that lasted through February, culminating in an 18x24" poster for beetiger, traded for one of the beautiful necklaces from her Frozen Honeybee Collection (the one pictured here, in fact). And which ended when I tried to do another piece of art for a friend and completely hated my sketch and stopped drawing for ... um ... pretty much the year, really.
* June: 30in30 -- this one was for writing entries, which I also accomplished.
* July: 10in10 -- for writing Sign and Sacrifice, in the hopes that I would kickstart myself writing again.
* November -- I set a goal of finishing Sign and Sacrifice in November. All I succeeded in finishing was an outline for the rest of the novel. I wrote maybe a few hundred words of story in the entire month. FAIL.

So I actually accomplished something like two marathons and a mini-marathon. Technically, I guess this is a success, in that 2.5=plural="some". I suspect I was thinking "some = four or five" when I started, though. On the other hand, I did a bunch of other creative stuff even when I wasn't marathoning, and since the underlying hope was "do more creative stuff", I'll call it a B+ on this.

Other Stuff from 2010

delight_in_wt: I started this during the June marathon, and did quite a bit of writing on it even after the marathon finished, until my enjoyment of it petered out in September.

sleethnamedthis: the World Tree game I've been running weekly on FurryMUCK since October 2009 is still going -- over sixty sessions now! The community is supposed to get updated with logs, but I am very bad about posting them. I believe this is the most frequently-running game I've ever done. Usually I hate running a game every week, but the format of this one has made it much easier to keep up on. I think in fifteen months it's been running, we've only cancelled seven or eight sessions.

Sign and Sacrifice: Despite my abject failure at NaNoFiMo, I've been writing steadily if not quickly since December, mostly on S&S. I got about 9800 words written in December. While not particularly impressive, this is still much better than 0.

Overall

The message of 2010 would be "I am doing this for love, not money". My creative efforts have been scattershot and not focused on anything I ever expect to get paid for. Despite this, I have an awful lot of determination to pursue them anyway, especially given that I often dread putting in the necessary work.

I am not sure why this is; either why I dread it, or why I am determined anyway. The latter is perhaps because I just don't feel like me if I'm not making anything.

New Year's Resolutions: 2011

Come to think of it, I didn't write down my 2010 resolutions until January 12th of last year. Yeah, I am not real big on getting these timed exactly.

I'm just doing two again:

Keep an activity log

OK, so I was pretty mediocre about doing this last year, but I still like the concept and I've been keeping up on it since December anyway.

Do a significant amount of writing

I should define "significant amount of writing" in some more concrete way. I'm thinking "more than I did in 2011", except I'm not sure how much I actually wrote in 2011. But less than a year of writing Prophecy because agggggggh Prophecy. I'll get back to you about what qualifies as an A on this.

Since December, I've been following more or less this plan:

1) Write for at least 30 minutes every day.
* "Writing" here includes such activities as "writing down words of a story", "writing an outline", "game prep"*, "staring at a blank screen for fifteen minutes doing nothing else while you try and fail to think of what to write"**. Research counts for half. Having a window open to write in while you are playing Puzzle Pirates does not count.
* If I actually do manage to get some writing done while multitasking, I can count words instead of time: 400 words = 30 minutes of writing.
2) You can get ahead but you can't fall behind.
* The idea here is to give myself an incentive to do more than the minimum, but to avoid the trap of 'I'm so far behind I'll never catch up, I give up'. So if I get ahead I can slack of for a day. If I slack off too much, I can still get ahead again on the next day by just doing more than the minimum -- I don't ever have to sink in eight hours just to "get back to even".

This is not my plan for all of 2011. This is my plan for January. At the beginning of every month, I am giving myself the option of switching to another tactic, because after all of these years I may finally realize the importance of giving myself an out. However, this plan will auto-renew monthly unless I do switch, because I also realize the importance of giving myself a default.

* Game prep counts because if it doesn't count, I won't do it. And I hate feeling badly unprepared for the game. ("Ordinary unprepared" is all right. It is not actually possible to be well-prepared for a game, so that would be a totally unrealistic goal.)
** My experience has been that my brain, when faced with a choice between "Either write something or BE BORED ", will almost always come up with something to write. I think I am pathologically afraid of boredom.