Stop Making Promises to Yourself

I hate New Year’s resolutions.

It is around this time that we all start to question the decisions that we have made throughout the current year, be it good or bad. It’s the season of second-guessing the past and adding to the already intense pressures that come with simply living in the now. The year creeps up on all of us and we are

forced to confront the fact that we are a year older and have to come to grips with the possibility that we have squandered more time for little reward.

What I propose is something that I have spoken about before on social media and amongst m friends. Supposed, for a moment, that we reject the idea of resolutions and unnecessary pressure on ourselves and instead we reflect on the things we have accomplished in the prior year. That instead of making promises to ourselves that we will most certainly brake in the first month or even days of the new year. For history is something that we can learn from to make better decisions and undoubtedly to this author, I have plenty that I can learn from.

This life is much too chaotic for stringent resolutions and paint-by-the-numbers planning. Things will get in your way; new obstacles will come up and there will be pitfalls that cause you to fall throughout the year. You cannot always stop from falling, but you can certainly learn from past decisions to roll with the impact. (A little role-playing-lingo lingo there.)

Which leads me to my year in review—

It wasn’t great, although I wouldn’t call it a failure either.

Back in July, I decided to pull my books off the market. I was having a lot of trouble finishing the third volume in the series and felt it was best to have a fresh reboot. I had made a lot of mistakes when I started this venture and needed to go back to square one and focus on the writing. However, my brain just wasn’t in the right space, so I decided to start something new for Nation Novel Writing Month and take a break from the story and characters that I had been trying to focus on.

Then that failed.

I had started with all the passion in the world, but when it came down to it, I just wasn’t hungry enough. I cruised through a chapter, and then another. It all seemed to be flowing but suddenly there was a block and I let all the externalities begin to make excuses for me missing one day, then another and eventually, I quit.

This was my low point and the experience that I will have to learn from in 2020.

My high point is the creation of Basement Quest with a longtime friend of mine. It is a blog and podcast dedicated to my longtime hobby of tabletop role-playing games. It was this project that motivated me to put my current series on hold and start on a new one. A fantasy project connected to what I hope to be a successful brand. Something that combines my love of role-playing games with elements of fantasy, sci-fi, thriller, horror, and adventure. I am still passionate about this project, but I know that I need to do it at my own pace and timeframe. Through Basement Quest I will be able to keep up my writing habits while building the next world for me to thrive in. I am optimistic about the future of this project, but I am not making any plans or resolutions.

So, what am I trying to say with all of this? I don’t know. I have no agenda, no expectations, no solution except to write. Looking at the past year, I realize that social media has taken up too much of my writing and not enough attention to the blogs that I manage. So I intend to use my blogs as a hub and share my thoughts through them no matter how trivial. If I read an article, I will post it here, if I see someone posting something I disagree with, I will not respond to them, I will research and write it here. Too much time on confrontation, and less time on work and prose.

So enough talk about what you’re going to do, tell me about what you have done.