Dear Me 2024

 Dear Me,

I really didn’t do well with my goals last year, so my goal this year is to be better at meeting my goals!  Which means I need to be realistic about what I can actually achieve.  My “new” job is pretty time-consuming and looking at the year ahead, there is not much in the way of breaks between events.  Which means a lot of cross-over as we try and wrap up and report on one, while setting up and producing the next.  It’s going to be intense.

 

With that in mind, my writing goals are going to be limited this year. I want to query Guide Us as I think it is probably more mainstream/commercial than most of my books and more likely to get me a new agent than some of my other stories.  I think it’s really close to being ready. I just need a day or two to read through the whole thing to see if the changes to the timeline and new scenes I added have bedded in properly.  You don’t want someone talking about something in the past that hasn’t actually happened yet!  It would be nice to get another set of eyes over it too, but I think I’ve exhausted my beta-readers for this one already, so I may need to trust my own judgement this time.  

 

In terms of new writing, I’d love to be able to put some real work into A Stranger to Kindness.  I really love my mute foster-kid and want to tell his story. It’s a goodie! Once I’ve got Guide Us out the door, I would like to put energy into that one. I’m just not sure I’ll have the time.  But even 500-1000 words a day would help get it finished and I’m sure I can find the 40 minutes or so a day I need to do that much.  I just find it hard to write like that.  I like to fall into the story and live there while I’m writing, and writing in scraps like that doesn’t get you into that space.  But if scraps of time are all I have, I’ll use them.

 

In the rest of my life, that part that’s not writing or work, I intend to keep reading as much as I can.  I haven’t hit my Goodreads goal the last two years, so I’m aiming a little lower for 2024. Not a huge amount, but a little.  Under 120 books for the first time in many years.  Hopefully I’ll manage to actually hit that goal this year.

 

And like every year, I will keep up my exercising and go to the gym at least four times a week and do as much exercise as I can outside of that too.  I never seem to lose any weight, but at least I feel reasonably fit and healthy.  I’m getting older and I probably need to do more to try and keep myself from getting those dreadful issues that older people seem prone to.

 

I will also keep gong to the movies as often as I can.  Even though I don’t work in film anymore, it’s still one of the things I’m most passionate about and I am all for keeping the theatrical experience alive and thriving.  I know I can watch films at home, and I do,  but it just isn’t the same as sitting in the dark experiencing the story with a roomful of other people.  I’m re-joining the Film Society for 2024, which means I will get to see something interesting every Monday night again.  And I got a 10-trip pass for the Film Festival for Xmas, so that’s me sorted for July.  Almost…  I probably will go to more than just ten films, but it’s a start!

 

Looking back at this, I feel like I make mostly the same goals every year. So for something new in 2024, I want to stop biting my fingernails.  I’ve done it all my life and I think it’s time to stop.  Before Christmas I experimented with some stick-on nails and they were good, except I kept losing them.  But my nails grew a lot in the 10 days or so I used them.  I even managed to keep them long for about two weeks after I took the falsies off.  Then I was reading at the beach one afternoon and bit them all off without realising.  D’oh!  So when I got home, I went and got my nails done at a salon for the first time in my life and now I have lovely long (half-fake) shiny pink nails.  I’m hoping my real nails will grow underneath while I genuinely can’t bite them (the tips are plastic right now), and by the time the fake ends have grown out, I’ll have nice long natural nails to get manicured and polished with something that will make them too hard to bite. That’s the plan, anyway.  Not sure if it will work.  I suspect my real nails might have been wrecked after all the grinding and buffing and stuff they did.  But it was an experience I’ve never had before, so worth it even if I means I only have nice nails for a few weeks…

And that's me for 2024, I think.  We'll check in mid-year to see how we're doing.  And I'll actually try to remember to do it this time!

XX Me