Jumping the Gun

It’s not the end of the old year yet—we’ve still got a week until Christmas—and I’m already looking ahead to 2014. While I’ve resolved not to make any more resolutions, since they never last beyond the first week of January, I do have a few nascent plans.

For one thing, I’d like to get more manuscripts out on the market. I didn’t have a release this year for a number of reasons, the foremost being that I didn’t finish a story or send one anywhere. That is not how writers have a career. I’ve theorized that it’s mathematically possible to write a book in a month. Now I have to prove it. There goes all the TV watching, but watch my backlist expand!

Meanwhile, back at Christmas … I might be wrong, but it looks like they ran all the good TV specials early in the month and now they’re just showing crap. I’ve seen all my favorites: SpongeBob, Heat Miser and Snow Miser, and Shrek the Halls. I tried to watch the Grinch (the real Grinch, the 1960s cartoon, not that abomination with Jim Carrey) but it was so chopped up I had to turn it off. TV shows were more show and less commercials 40-odd years ago.

For years my traditional view-on-Christmas movie was Die Hard. Yes, that is a Christmas movie, more or less. And who wouldn’t want to spend the holidays with Alan Rickman? All I need now is a radio station that will play Cheech and Chong’s “Santa Claus and His Old Lady” and I’m set for another year.

Okay, I’m making one resolution: no more buying Christmas cards. I have a couple boxes of generic cards I picked up at the dollar store, but my brother and some special friends get funny cards from the Kmart. Or they did, until I saw what American Greetings are going for these days. Are you kidding me? So, starting next year, I’m renewing a Cunningham family tradition. For years my cost-conscious mom made her own cards with typing paper, colored pens and stickers. They were chintzy looking and funny as hell. Hey, I’ve got paper and pens, and I can draw a stick figure just as well as anybody. Look out, family members, the El Cheapo Card Company is back in business!

As for New Year’s Eve, that’s still up in the air. I’d go out somewhere and watch something drop, but it’s too damn cold. There’s also the question of whether or not I can stay awake until midnight. I used to be a night owl—I’d write from 10 at night until 3 or 4 in the morning, and I used to work second shift so I could sleep in—but over the years my sleep patterns have changed. Now I find myself fading out around 9-9:30 at night, probably because I get up around 6-6:30 in the morning, even though I don’t have to be anywhere. That just means the stray cat gets fed early. Hope he appreciates it.

My trick to stay up late used to be carb loading. A cheesesteak and Coke for dinner would keep me running for hours. These days, I dunno. Any more I just go to bed, and if I’m still up at midnight I’ll watch the ball drop in New York. The trouble with this plan is that I can’t get back to sleep afterwards.

I miss my one friend’s annual bash in Valley Forge, but I don’t miss the long drive home, or feeling like a zombie on New Year’s Day. Maybe I’ll drive the mile or so up the road to Akron and watch them drop the giant sneaker or whatever it is from wherever they lower it from. Ephrata doesn’t drop anything. I’d love to drive over to Falmouth, where they drop a straw goat from a flagpole. Let’s see what the temperature is, and how many Cokes I can ingest.

And then, starting New Year’s Day, I start producing manuscripts to inflict on innocent publishers. Unless I stay up late and wake up a zombie. Better drink a lot of Cokes. That’s pretty much my plans for the holidays. Nothing spectacular, just trying to stay awake. Bring ‘em on!

That Time of Year

Yep, it’s that time again – time to list the New Year’s resolutions.

Usually I resolve to lose weight, and blow that one in a week. That’s not my fault; grocery stores should not have cookie and snack aisles. Somebody ought to file a lawsuit.

Back on topic. I’m making different resolutions this year. Some of them relate to writing; I’ll get to them in a minute.

First and foremost, I resolve to cut back on and possibly eliminate all clutter in the house. My 30+ year book collection and I went from a two-story house with an attic into a mobile home. I have few flat surfaces in the house that aren’t covered by some form of paper. The Book Room looks like something from Hoarders. Therefore, I resolve to throw out at least one item per day for the entire year of 2012. That includes magazines I don’t look at, old papers I don’t read, clothes I don’t wear any more and the socks with the holes in the heels. If I get rid of enough stuff, I’ll have room for newer, shinier stuff. Not to mention I’ll actually be able to move around in the Book Room. In theory.

(Don’t worry about the books. I won’t be throwing them out. Any book I decide I don’t want will go to a friend of mine, who has dibs on my ‘70s and ‘80s SF paperbacks. Anything she doesn’t want will be donated to the library for their annual book sale. Somebody somewhere will give them a good home.)

Now for the writing resolutions. I’m going to double my backlist for 2012. I’ve got five out right now, so I’m aiming for ten by next December. That’s doable if I write novellas. In my mind, a “book” is still anything over 50,000 words, but I notice a lot of the works available run in the 30K range. The real pros can do that in a month, some of them in a week. I take a little longer because I tend to fart around. That’s my other writing resolution: no more farting around. There’s no reason I can’t turn out at least 1000 words every day if I set my mind to it. There’s nothing on daytime TV anyway. Or nighttime, for that matter.

Plus I have a book coming out from Siren in February, so I’m already ahead of the game. I only have to sell four more and I’m good for the year. Yay, me!

Farther down the resolution list, I’d like to dip my toes in the self-publishing waters. I’m going to check with my former SF publishers and see what rights I have to the stories I sold back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. If things go well with those, I’ll try a novel. These are all in the fantasy and science fiction genres, so there won’t be any conflicts with my romance publishing. I’ve got my pen names lined up and everything. I’ll let you know how it goes.

That should hold me until December 31, 2012. Or December 21, when the Mayan calendar says the world will end. Hmmm, better get started.

What the hell, might as well try to lose weight while I’m at it. Couldn’t hurt, and I want to look good when the world goes kablooey. Happy New Year, everybody!

Brave New World

I'm not going to talk about the novel by Aldous Huxley, but my foray into the brave new world of iPods.

See, I got an iPod for Christmas. It's not a new iPod but a "re-gift". Every year my family tries to find things that we have, but don't use, and "re-gift" this item to someone who can use it.

This is actually a good thing because the "re-gifter" can reduce clutter and make the "re-gifties" Christmas fantastic. This year, my dad "re-gifted" me an iPod. He's had it for a few years and just never used it. My dad is an audiophile (he's really into sounds) and the iPod just doesn't reproduce sound quality like his spectacular stereo system. Hell, if I had his ballistic speakers, I wouldn't need an iPod either! :)

Now, I've never owned an iPod before and I'm excited to figure it all out. But it's a brave new world to me. I'm sure my nieces and nephews would have this thing wired in about 10 minutes--me? Oh, brother! It took me an hour just to figure out how to hook the darn thing up and then getting songs on to it? Criminey! I'm so lost and the instruction manual isn't much help. Apparently, I'm supposed to lay my hand upon the manual and understand by some kind of magical osmosis. I tried that and it didn't work either.

What I figured out was I just have try things and when they don't work, try something else. As I was playing with my nifty new toy I decided the iPod was metaphoric--just as I try things in life and they don't work, I can try something else.

Nothing is written in stone. I can switch gears because I have nothing to lose. I could put all kinds of junk onto the iPod and if it didn't work out, I could just delete everything and start over. I can do the same thing with my writing. I've written pages and pages and then decided I didn't like them, deleted them, and started over.

So as I spent Christmas morning playing with my iPod I took stock of my life and the things that I do and realized nothing is cast in "forever" unless I allow it to be so. If I don't like my weight, I can change it. If I don't like how much TV I watch, I can change it. Oddly, I found learning about this handy-dandy device immensely empowering--I can change my whole life if only I chose to do so.

This segues nicely into my resolutions for the New Year. I would like to change a few things in my life and after programming and re-programming my iPod, I now know that I can change anything if I want to. The trick is that I have to want to change it and then take the time to learn how to change it.

How about you? Is there something in your life you would like to re-program this year?