Same bad puns. Honestly, it sounded better in my head than it reads in the header, but I also originally planned to write it as “You(niverse)”…until that looked dumb, also. So here we are.

Happy New Year to you all, since it is now late enough that everyone has crossed the arbitrary boundary between 2017 and the three weeks of incorrectly writing 2017 on things. I’m sure I will be among those people. I hope you all had a lovely night and didn’t wake up with hangovers today, or if you did wake up feeling hungover I hope it didn’t linger too long. Like many, many, many other people, I am using the new year as a means of setting goals for myself in an effort to talk less and do more. I still refuse to call them New Year’s Resolutions, as the moment that label touches something it transforms into an impossible goal for most people.

I happen to be like most people, and so by the power of superstition (and perhaps the power of Greyskull) I will refer to these things as goals. They are all tentative, and written with the understanding that a goal left not achieved isn’t a failure – it’s simply that I’m not a goddamn superhero. Life happens, and so my goals and plans and so on will adjust accordingly.

Without further delay, my goals for the year thus far:

• Finish editing Dissonance in Harmony and begin to put serious work into moving it from a draft on my computer to a published novel.
• Edit (the Hell out of) Babel, Restored – this is the immediate sequel to Dissonance in Harmony, and the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2016. God help me with this one.
• Begin writing the draft of Book 3 in this trilogy.
  • Related – Think of a name for Book 3 as well as a name for the trilogy
• Write more short stories with the goal of getting them published. I have fallen into a gruesome trap of letting myself not reign in ideas. I enjoy writing novels, but I feel like writing more short stories would be beneficial.
• Similarly, write more essays!
• Keep reading!
  • Read more variety than the usual business of fantasy, sci-fi, and comedy-fueled variants of the two previously mentioned genres.
• Avoid limiting myself to set lists of things (the irony of this being the last list item on here is not lost on me).

I’m using a nice new Moleskine notebook I got as a Christmas gift to write down goals for the day. I’m also tracking leftover goals from the previous day.

No matter what goals or, God help you, Resolutions you all may be chasing, I wish you all the best of luck. Barring luck, I wish you all an abundance of motivation, resolve, and patience with yourselves. Happy 2017 2018!