It’s Resolutionary! (Also: Write1Sub1 – Week #1 Check-In)
Image courtesy of Hryck
I am a firm believer in the art of not making New Year’s resolutions. Yes, I call it an “art” because it takes a certain amount of skill, of craftsmanship, to not leap aboard the caboose of the FreshStartCleanSlate bandwagon. After all, everyone else is doing it. That train is so long it typically takes an entire year to pass before the next one shows up. And if you’re not so weak-willed that you jump when everyone tells you to, then maybe you get irritated with all the questions: What are your New Year’s resolutions? They ask. Why don’t you have any New Year’s resolutions? They wonder. Isn’t there something you want to accomplish? To reconsider? To look forward to? And when you won’t concede, the snark sometimes comes out. Oh, you’re one of those. So sometimes it’s easier to make them up, just to please the people and continue the conversation. Except if you do it often enough, come January 1st, you find an actual written list in your pocket and a shiny, beefed-up gym membership on your credit card bill. Like I said: an art.
The simple reason I set up my cookware around the ‘No thanks’ campfire when it comes to New Year’s resolution making has to do with expectation. Expecting to keep the goals you set, the promises you make to yourself, for an entire year is a set up for failure. (Fine, it works for some people. I, however, have not actually met any of those, but would love to be introduced.) When expecting nothing, there’s a lot more wiggle room for good things to happen without being disappointed when they don’t.
Except I do think goal setting to be an important practice, so how does one reconcile the two? The best way I can think of is to use what’s so attractive about making New Year’s resolutions (the new, the fresh start, the back-to-the-beginning, the count-up-from-1), chop the year up into quarters (a natural process anyway, thanks to the Earth’s rotation), and acquire four access points to retreat/regroup/start over. But you’re still setting yourself up to fail! Sure, but a potential four months of failing before clean-slating certainly sounds less depressing than twelve, right?
So let’s begin the Winter Quarter with a progress report on my budding journey as a Write1Sub1 participant. The idea, in a very tiny nutshell, is to write and submit a different piece of fiction (or poetry, or script, or essay, or etc) every week for (ruh roh) a year (or a month, I decided week; subject to change). The story written does not always equal the story submitted. Inevitably, the end game will see 52 stories written and 52 stories submitted. Easy peasy? Um, no, but challenge has been accepted anyway.
W1S1 Week 1: Sooooooo How’d You Do?
The Write Part: Well, I was expecting to do a little better than I did. 680 words on a piece (working) title’d: Barista Blues. Learning from this week’s mistakes, I think I’m going to start using the LensWright project as inspiration for Week 2.
The Sub Part: Submitted a 140-character piece to Twitterzine trapeze magazine called Individualism. It was actually something I’ve been toiling with for a few months now. Mostly reformatting, rewriting, reconfiguring. Writing micro fiction is akin to wrestling a jigsaw puzzle. It’s sweaty and involves lots of pieces flying around trying to fit somewhere for big-picture purposes.
Final Thoughts: Despite the womp-womp feeling that came with writing this week’s new piece, I’m still looking forward to Week 2.