And so the momentum project finally comes to a close. It was a year ago I figured taking on a New Year's resolution was too ambitious and too long-term of a project to sustain, so instead I'd try a different "project" each month. To review:
JANUARY: Finish the 2012 NaNoWriMo manuscript. FAIL. Even though I was over 60,000 words by the end of November, I didn't push through to the end of what was a particularly ambitious story. At least not yet. I still mean to finish it someday.
FEBRUARY: Make healthy choices whenever the opportunities presented themselves. SUCCESS. I wasn't perfect, but I held to the idea pretty well. Unfortunately it takes more than 28 days to establish a long-term habit, so that idea faded off once the accountability was gone.
MARCH: Organize all of my digital files. FAIL. Turns out I have a lot of them, and I care far less about how organized they are than I thought I did.
APRIL: Really clean the house. SUCCESS. But I had the pressure of Taco Party #1 to motivate me.
MAY: Write a blog post every day for a month. SUCCESS, in the sense that I actually did it. But the result made me reconsider my reasons for bothering to continue the blog at all -- something I've been thinking about ever since then, and even more in the past few days with a new year right around the corner.
JUNE: Fall off the face of the earth. SUCCESS. After the way the school year ended, I needed time to just let life drift along. June took care of that nicely.
JULY: Finish my "Following Infinity" rewrite. SUCCESS. Now its just waiting for the world to discover it, even if that means one person at a time for the present.
AUGUST: Get myself mentally ready for the school year. Qualified SUCCESS, because I wasn't as ready to dive back in as I wanted to be. But a well-timed vacation and a few other moments gave me some valuable perspective.
SEPTEMBER: Stay on top of life. SUCCESS. Normally by the time the school year is a few weeks old, I've become swamped with the things I need to do between my teaching and my civilian life. Some proactive thinking helped a lot. Happily I've done fairly well at maintaining this.
OCTOBER: Prepare for NaNoWriMo 2013. SUCCESS. By the time I reached the end of the month, I was ready to tear into the new manuscript with a pile of ideas and plot devices and a busload of fairly developed characters just waiting for more definition.
NOVEMBER: Reach the NaNoWriMo goal of writing 50,000 words in a month. Which I did, but once again, even if I wound up with a word count that topped 70,000 by the time the month ended I still haven't finish the story. Yet.
Which brings us to DECEMBER, in which I set the goal of having a happy month. With only a couple days left I think I can call this one a success. Not only did I manage to avoid the unpleasant moments that made the previous December so difficult, but I had some happier ones take their place. And this whole late December/all of January time of the year is not my favorite, so to feel like the month went well is a pretty big thing.
Where does this leave me at the end of 2013? It's nice knowing I stuck to the project for the whole year, but few of the things I tried to do made any difference in the end, so the point could be argued that the endeavor was a waste of time... at least outside of the goals related to writing, which are probably things I would have done anyway and just used as placeholders to avoid taking on goals that would have been more challenging or significant.
So I don't think I'll be continuing any of this project-of-the-month business anymore. And I don't see any resolutions being made for 2014. There are still things about life I would like to learn or experience or change or improve, but to make any of those stated goals with deadlines would only add pressure that wouldn't help get them done. Maybe 2014 won't be a year for a resolution, but instead just a year that I decide to give some new things a try.
But regardless of how the project turned out, I think it's fair to say that in 2013 I at least made it down the hill when it came to writing. As for what comes next? This year's experience of taking a four-year-old manuscript out of the archive and seeing it come back to life in exciting ways is proof there's really no way to tell what the future holds -- an idea that both excites and intimidates me. Someone told me not long ago they were confident I had a big year ahead of me. Maybe. Maybe not. There's no way to see it coming until it happens. All anyone can ever do is put themselves in the best positions possible for when the right opportunities come along. For all I know the next few weeks could bring on some big changes, or the whole year could just quietly pass by.
Now it's just a matter of being ready to live with whatever comes along.
