I don’t do new year resolutions. Resolutions to me, one either succeeds at the resolution or fails. No in between. I don’t think that’s a sustainable way to better yourself. You’re gonna have ups and downs and you have to accommodate for the ebbs and flows of life, so I prefer to give myself targets to reach because if I am ever off target, I can take a step back, a deep breath, realign and try again.

One of my targets for 2022 is to write more of everything and to not pigeonhole myself into a genre or type and of course to finish Book 2 in the The Night of the Hunter Series. It’s become a beast and I can’t seem to get the characters or flow right, but I’ll get there and writing more will help.

So, I started this writing target with a poem a day in January.
31 poems.
Seemed easy enough.

Reality is that life is not all that conducive to writing, or I felt that my life is not conducive for me to write everyday.

I am not making an excuse for myself. It’s a reality I have come to realise as a truth for me and I no longer beat myself up for not writing every single day. At work where I spend a good portion of my day reviewing, reading, and proofing the work of others. The last thing I want to do when I get home is spend more time in front of a monitor or even looking at words that are my own even if the creativity is there. I am beyond mentally pooped to crank out 500-1000 words a day.

So in my self imposted writing challenge, I had to do a lot of forward planning with my writing. Aside from a few pieces, there was no revisiting to make it perfect. It was churn it out and move on. Any pieces that I had started during the week had to be finished by Saturday night so I could draft all the posts for my website on Sunday. Some weeks the writing sessions were crammed into a single day as The Muse did not show up during the week.

The haikus were the easiest to write.
Last week’s poems were a beast to write and I feel they were my most terrible ones.

But what I took away from this challenge is that I still love to write. It allows me to express what’s in my head even if it makes no sense at all. I like the freedom of writing. I like the joy of it and sometimes I even like the heartache and pain it brings.

For February, I haven’t decided what, if any, my self imposed writing challenge will be.
I may take the month off and write as it The Muse hits versus forcing The Muse to work.

But at least I know, I’m on target to write more in 2022.