I didn’t do New Year’s Resolutions last year, and that did not turn out as well as planned.  The only thing I really accomplished was getting my CISSP, and then worked drowned me and health really drowned me and I was so uninterested in doing anything else that I basically only read security literature and coasted.  I was essentially sick from March – November.  As years go, 2008 was one I’d rather give a miss.

This year I have several goals I want to accomplish:

1. Writing research, research, research

This is the year of focused reading and heavy note taking.  I have my topics: the occult (Alchemy, Hermetic, Kabbalah), fairy tales (Germanic/British), some Middle English, Joseph Campbell, some high-quality books on writing.  My huge knowledge of history is helpful when overlaid with myth to weave into things.  I have all the tools I need to take the notes and organize them into easily searchable categories.  I also have all the books.  I simply need to do the work and carve out the time to do the work.  I’m tired of procrastinating and saying I will get to it. I have the seeds of several ideas in my head — I need to do the background work and the notetaking work.

Thankfully I also read Katie something fairytale-ish every single night and that is leading mousedroppings of ideas in my head.

This ties neatly in with #2…

2. Spend much more time at the gym.

One of the problems I have with the gym was not allowing myself to just go, get on a bike, ride for 10 miles, and say that was far better than skipping.  No, I had to get to some ideal of pushing myself to lose weight.  And because I was pushing myself I wasn’t going.  Instead, I need to retool the gym and realize that 30 minutes on a reclining bike is 30 minutes of both exercise and reading time.  That is 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading time while burning calories. I simply need to get into the rhythm.

3. Learn to crochet

I want to be able to make simple hats and bags.  I’m not holding myself to some great ideal, but if I can make simple things from patterns, that would be wonderful.  If anything, I can follow instructions.  When I am not reading I want to make something.

4. Spend more time with Katie Rose

Always!  But she has a tiny piano now and I want to spend alot more time playing it with her.  I bought it for her for a reason.  We have a book!  We just need to work on basic things.  We’re already working on a basic scale and she’s fascinated.

5. Focus on my Japanese

I’ve been picking at Japanese for 2 years.  I simply need to make my Japanese language podcasts a priority in my podcast queue, and that is a little change with big payoffs.

6. Back off my online time

It is eating into my research/writing time.  And that is more important to me.

I am putting music aside (for now) to focus on writing research.  Theoretically, I should have enough notes by November to use NaNoWriMo as a way to flesh out the strands of ideas, and then use those strands to start working into real functional manuscripts.  I have no idea if I’m going after novels or if I can find an artist who can draw against scripts or what, but I need to amass notes like a crazy weasel so I have a body to work from.  That’s how I work — from notes to scraps of ideas to fully formed things.

That’s it!  Happy 2009!