Help! The Year Has Started Without Me!

Like a lot of my other ambitious, motivated, and introspective fellow sojourners, I spent the days leading into 2010 resolving resolutions, gathering goals, and pondering passions. Before baby new year took it's first toddling steps, I had pretty much prioritized my projects and pursuits.

But our home-from-college son was still hanging out, or at least sleeping (sometimes till noon), at home so I couldn't get too serious about getting back on track.

Then the day after Nate flew back to his Oklahoma campus, I packed up my laptop, books, novel manuscript, cross-stitch project, and clothes and drove to Tampa. The next morning, our daughter had surgery. Somebody (me!) had to give her and her husband a helping hand with their two energetic boys.

I'm still here, a week after her surgery, changing diapers, giving kisses before naps, reading bedtime stories. (And, yes, I'm also unloading and loading the dishwasher, folding laundry, and sweeping the floor.)

I may not have jumped into 2010 with zeal and purpose. But a couple of nights I stayed up way past my bedtime and listened to Nate talk about college classes and friends. And now I'm spending quantity time (a healthy mix of chaos and peace) with my grandboys and their parents.

January speeds by while even my priority projects languish. So be it.

Next week I'll be home, back to a routine, back to my beloved grindstone.

And missing Nate coming in late.

And missing Jeremy's ceaseless questions.

And missing Jedidiah's impish baby grin.

Reading Challenge: 10-10-10

"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life," writes Stephen King in his classic, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (p. 147).

Here's a reading challenge that lets you read old favorites and expand your literary horizons: Read ten books in ten genres by October 10, 2010. The genres can be however you define them. Here are mine:

• C. S. Lewis (by and about)
• J. R. R. Tolkien (by and about)
• Christian Classics
• Children's Classics
• Short Stories & Plays/Epic Poems
• Modern Library Top 100 List
• Books on Writing/Career
• Inspirational Fiction
• Fiction Miscellany
• Nonfiction Miscellany

Completed books: Peace Like a River by Leif Enger (Inspirational Fiction) and The Tsarina's Daughter by Carolly Erickson (Fiction Miscellany).

Currently reading: The Silmarillion (Tolkien) and My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers (Christian Classics.

I'm also reading A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle, but I'm not sure what category it goes in.

We're writers and we're readers. So grab your library card, join a book exchange, or browse the shelves at your favorite bookstore to get started on your own 10-10-10 reading challenge. And let me know your ten genres.

New Year's Resolutions -- For Keeps

The first week of a new year is a great time to curl up in your favorite chair with How to Reach Your Full Potential for God by Dr. Charles F. Stanley. His seven essentials provide a compelling framework for those of us who can’t resist the urge to make resolutions. The book’s path to healthy hearts, minds, and bodies is paved with spiritual insights and practical suggestions.

For example, Essential #1: A Clean Heart encourages us to set our hearts toward purity. In this chapter, Dr. Stanley discusses the power of daily abiding in Scripture and God’s call for “us to actively and intentionally yield our entire selves to His will on a day-to-day basis.” Essential #4: A Healthy Body presents practical advice on sleep, nutrition, and exercise. Other essentials discuss such topics as relationships, scheduling, and taking risks.

The motivational book provides a Godly foundation for this year’s resolutions. The prayerful resolve to improve oneself and grow spiritually within the seven essentials may prove stronger than the making of isolated, easy-to-make/easy-to-break goals. May this be the year to live the book’s subtitle: “Never Settle for Less than His Best.”

(NOTE: I received a complimentary copy of this book from Thomas Nelson, Inc.)

Priority Projects

My writing resolutions aren't SMART goals, so I'm calling them Priority Projects instead. Here they are in their unadorned skivvies (in other words, the basics).

Dream Trail

• Polish Twirl (renamed When Sparrow Falls);
• "Snowflake" a previously abandoned novel; and
• Devote at least twenty-five to thirty hours per week on fiction projects.

Publishing Trail

• One query/submission per week.
• Write every day.
• Update blogs at least once a week.

The details are more complex, but these priorities fit on a postcard that I've placed in a prominent place in my Daytimer. And they're easy to remember.

What are your writing priorities for 2010?

Passionate Pursuits

Goals The word hangs in the air, casting its long shadow across the falling grains of sand in Time's hourglass, a pall over our good intentions. To join in the New Year's emphasis on resolutions, I wrote this poetic treatise.

Goals: A Poem

Make 'em.

Break 'em.

Actually, I make goals every year. Sometimes I even keep them.

Sometimes I go beyond them.

Passionate Pursuits A couple of days ago, I found a list of 24 potential hobbies and interests from July 2005. A few I've already embraced or accomplished. Some no longer interest me.

Two intrigued me -- one of those aha kind of moments. So in 2010, I'm going to:

• learn how to operate that expensive camera we bought for our daughter's wedding two years ago;
• participate in Florida's State Forest Trailwalker Program.

Goals guide us.

Passionate pursuits propel us.

You've been thinking about goals. Now think about your passions. What are you pursuing this year?

Fanatics

My oldest and my youngest are shivering in the rain at the Gator Bowl. Bethany and Nathaniel are longtime Seminole fans so they're ecstatic to participate in college football history.

3:26 pm text message: Sun came out, not freezing anymore. All food places running out of food.

I indulge in my fanaticism tomorrow at the Seventh Annual Lord of the Rings Extended Version Movie Marathon with the bonus showing of The Hunt for Gollum. Here's a photo from last year's gathering the fellowship faithful.

The posters was a gift from my son-in-law. Somehow he talked a video store into letting him have them and then he passed them on to me.

A Christmas Legacy

"Do you think they'll read these?" my son-in-law asked as he helped me insert the plastic-protected pages between the covers of the two navy blue albums late Christmas Eve 2007.

"I know they will." I smiled, more to myself than at him. I knew in the deepest abyss of my heart that I was giving my daughters a treasured gift. The timing was perfect as both girls looked forward to life-changing joys: Bethany's pregnancy for her second child, Jill's after-Christmas wedding. They faced the future, but my gift transported them to the past.

On May 9, 1981, only days before my 24th birthday and a few months before my first pregnancy, I wrote on the first page of my first blank book. I've filled up enough blank books since then to fill a small plastic tote. Books I allowed no one to read.

Until that Christmas. I typed selected entries from each journal using a cursive font, scanned and inserted photos, and printed the entire document, twice, onto pale mauve paper.

Thanks to my intermittent journal-keeping, I gave my girls the gift of knowing me when I was a young wife and new mother. I shared childhood anecdotes about them and their younger brother. I entrusted them with joys and with sorrows.

And, yes, Bethany and Jill read their copies just as I knew they would. Laughing. Crying. Because of a Christmas gift begun before I knew them.

If you keep a journal, consider sharing the gift of your younger self with your loved ones. Or begin keeping a journal now. Your current words are a future treasure.

Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones.

The Lazy Trap

In an early draft of my latest novel, I wrote that my protagonist stole a truck and then continued on with the story.

Lazy, lazy, lazy!

I didn't want to figure out how she stole the truck and I very much wanted to get to the part where she helps the man of her dreams escape from a prisoner-of-war camp.

My critique group thought differently.

"Show it!" Karen demanded.

"No!!" Jeanie admonished.

The latest draft shows my protagonist finding the truck, considering the truck, stealing the truck.

Please tell me I'm not the only writer to fall into the lazy trap.