I suppose I have many of the usual resolutions that everyone else has-- eat less, stress less, exercise more, be nicer, yadda yadda, yadda.  I won't bother with listing them because as far as I'm concerned, there is only one in my life that really counts:


As 2006 has proven repeatedly, I am not happy if I don't write.  While there are many wonderful things about my life, I am empty and unfulfilled, I am miserable, if I can't squeeze writing into my life.  There was once a time when everything revolved around my writing, but it has somehow evolved to the opposite: now my writing revolves around everything else and as a result it takes a backseat to everything else.  I have to turn it back to where it was or face and accept that fact that this means I am no longer a writer.  This has been going on for so long that, indeed, this may already have become fact, and I can't fathom continuing this way emotionally year after year after year.  The last novel I managed to complete was a tie-in, Ultraviolet, in March of 2005.  The last solo novel was Mirror Me, way back in December of 2001.  Here and there between March 2005 and now were some stories and essays, but they, too, have dribbled away to no output.  I blame part of this on my former agent, who I think took much of the momentum out of my career by lying for several years about submitting Mirror Me (which was finally published by a small press in January 2004, but never made a paperback sale), but let's be honest: a writer certainly can't sell something that hasn't been written.  The responsibility for the switch in priorities rests solely on me-- I let other things and people and circumstances in my life smother the thing I love the most.  I, and only I, allowed this to happen.  And it has to me who unhappens it.  So.

Here are those who are gone but not forgotten with the passing of an old year and the birthing of a new one.  In fact, as I get older, I seem to remember-- and miss-- these wonderful spirits more each year.
Relatives:

Yvonne Spraggins, Rochelle Holmes, Debra Pique, Kay and Andrew Kish, Garlon and Virginia Sanders, Eddie and Mazie Buechel.

Friends:

Patty Wold, Dorothy Harrington, Charlie Grant, Mark Siegel, David Gemmell.

Pets:

Frisky, King, Coco, Daffy, Chanci, Lily.

Happy 2007.  Let's get on with it!

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End of the day word count at 10:51 p.m.:

4,343 / 120,000 (3.6%)