New (School) Year's Resolutions

We're gearing up for the first day of school, and the promise of five afternoons each week with two girls in school and one baby in bed is having the same effect on me as New Year's Eve. A new beginning. The possibilities are endless, especially now that I'm unemployed.

My impromptu resolutions for those two and a half hours each day:

1. Keep the television, the telephone, and the vacuum cleaner silent. Relish the quiet.
2. Spend a little while reading something that makes me want to be better, live better, write better.
3. Make a more assertive effort to find an agent. I've spent most of 2010 waiting, waiting, waiting for agent responses...with no end in sight. If I'm going to be waiting anyways, I should send out more queries and increase my chances that someone, someday will answer the call.
4. Begin the real work of drafting my second novel. Nearly every night for the past year I've stared up at my ceiling, listening to my husband sleep while ideas for characters, scenes, and dialogue swirl lazily around in my head. Every now and then I steal a few minutes to plunk out some of the more concrete ideas on my computer, but for the most part it is all locked Upstairs. I have a skeleton plot, title, main characters and themes. Now I need to take all those parts and make something with them. So, instead of spending yet another year carrying all my eggs around in the basket of A First Novel, I'm going to draft A Second Novel. I'm not giving up on the first, but I think it's a good tactic to keep writing books until one of them sells. Then it will be much easier to say to the world, "And guess what else I have waiting on my hard drive!"
5. Bake cookies for my girls to come home to on a regular basis. I loved loved loved that when I was a little girl.

Author's Note: If you are questioning the credibility of goal number four, the claim that I "stared up at my ceiling" and you're thinking "how can one stare at a dark ceiling?" let me insert a fact. There are projector clocks that shine the time right onto your dark ceiling, pretty much the same standard technology that Batman provided the mayor with to project his bat signal into the night sky. In fact, I refer to my clock as my "bat signal," as in "I forgot to turn on my bat signal." Really, this is one of the true miracles of modern technology. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you can simply look up to know what time it is, no more fumbling to glimpse the tiny numbers glowing out from your nightstand. Or, if you are thinking about writing books instead of going to sleep at a prudent hour, you can watch the time change every sixty seconds. My particular projector clock offers an assortment of "font" colors including green, blue and red. When Jeremy first gave me my clock I instantly loved it so much that for awhile it was one of the main events on our "tour of the house" when family and friends came into town.