Saturday, December 29, 2001

Okay. Yes I realize that writing is not everything. It's close, mind you -- but even I have moments where I am momentarily interested in something else. Like photography, for instance.

So I'm going to change things. I'm going to have at least one hour a day where I work on something outside of writing and web work. Photography is likely to be top of the list. Reading (which won't be confined to this hour, of course) might fill the time. Photography won't be taking pictures, but working on organizing them. My collections are horribly confused right now, and I would like to be able to call up pictures I want to see without having to go hunt through dozens of boxes of disks and hope that I have the right dates...

I just made a quick check of my computer files and found 23 short stories (short being not entirely correct) to edit and put out next year. That's not bad at all. And that's just with a quick run through the files, and does not include any novels. I can think of a couple of those right off that I'd like to clean up and get out -- Such Gifts as These and Waiting for the Last Dance, although I will probably hold the last one for next years Delacorte contest.

Preparing myself for the next year is a ritual I go through every late December. It's my way of saying that I can do better, if I just put a little more effort into it. Better at a lot of things, though most often everything but writing sort of falls by the wayside. Writing drives me, and no matter how hard I try to turn my attention to something else, it always comes back to this. But every year I try a little harder and make it just a bit farther in these other goals. So, if I don't at least try, I'm not going to get anywhere at all.

Time to go redo my daily check sheet for next year...

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