New Year's Resolutions? Not for me, by Neil McGowan

It’s that time of year when one usually makes their New Year’s resolutions. I’ve done so in the past (and usually, to be fair, have managed to keep to them; however, I put this down to them being reasonably small steps to take).

This year, however, my resolution was not to make any resolutions. Instead of planning for the year, I’m going to try and ‘pants’ it. Pretty much like I do with most of my writing, although I have been dabbling with plotting for a while with reasonable success.

That’s not to say I don’t have some ideas in mind for goals I’d like to reach – There’s a couple of pieces of Bach’s music for which I have guitar transcriptions and I’d like to learn them; there’s also a couple of pieces I’d like to master on the piano as well, for example – but I don’t want to set dates on them. I’d rather enjoy the journey of discovery as I come to learn the pieces.

It’s a similar story with writing. I have a few projects that I aim to finish this year. I have a new YA novel that’s almost halfway through the first draft, as well as a couple of short stories that are sketched out and nearly ready to write. I also want to start planning the next YA novel (it’ll be the final part of a trilogy) as well as working towards publication.

But at the moment, I’m enjoying the sheer pleasure of playing with words. I’ve typed very little over the last three or four weeks, but I have written by hand quite a bit. Nothing too long (my handwriting is bad to begin with, and degenerates to an illegible scrawl fairly quickly), just quick notes and ideas of how a story might go and the themes I might want to consider, as well as how certain ideas may fit within the larger narrative whole.

About the only thing I’ve set a target for is on GoodReads. I do the same every year – make my reading goal 52 books. Not sure why, to be honest, as I always seem to beat it – I’ve read two books already this year (Ed James’s Hell’s Kitchen and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Eyes of the Void) have started my third (Doug Johnstone’s Dead Beat). Last year’s final total was 64 books; the year before was 72.

I’m lucky in that both my wife and children are avid readers. We have a tradition that, for every book we read, we add a pound to the ‘book tin’. At the end of each year, we split it between us and head off to the local bookshop to buy more books. It’s a nice little extra bonus, and because it’s just a bit of loose change every so often, you don’t really notice it until you tally up at the end of the year. Even the kids enjoy it, and it’s almost a competition between them, to the extent that my eldest is now asking if she can count the beta reading of my YA books towards her total. Oh, and could I also hurry up and finish the current book so she can find out what happens next…

May I take this opportunity to wish a (slightly late) Happy New Year, and health wealth, and happiness to all!