Hope everyone had some happy holidays! I know I did. I usually get antsy taking too much time off, but I forced myself to slow down this year. A benefit of working at a university is that the place closes around the holidays. We get a few days, but it’s one of those “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here” situations, so you’re encouraged to save up vacation time which meant I’ve had the last two weeks off. Got some great family time and sleep – oh, precious sleep! On top of all that, it gave me time to think long and hard about my writing.

I’ve come to a couple of decisions:

I’m going to self-publish a couple books. I’d wanted – and still do – go the traditional route, but I’m seeing more and more how subjective the industry really is. That isn’t to say I’m giving up on finding an agent or editor. Far from it. I want to self-publish some of my novels that I believe are good, worked really hard on, and absolutely love. There are stories I feel are worth telling and I don’t want them to disappear.

So, I’m going to publish them myself. I’m pretty excited about the prospect and we can talk a lot more about this later as I get further along.

Since the holidays – yes, those same holidays – took me away from NaNoWriMo this year, I’ve decided that January is going to be my personal National Novel Writing Month!

What can I say? I’m a masochist. I missed out on that great love/hate of pushing yourself to hit a huge word count. I can be productive otherwise, but I really want to see if I can do 50,000 words in thirty days again. Okay, so January is actually thirty-one days, but if you want to split hairs here, I haven’t had a chance to get started until today so really we’re talking about 50,000 words in twenty-five days. Does that make you feel better?

My cap needs this feather right now. I also need to finish my current manuscript. Oy vey, this one is ballooning up. Hitting that 50K mark is definitely going to make a dent.

The funny thing is that I don’t consider either of these to be New Year’s Resolutions. I had two weeks off and time to think and came up with them independently. The fact that we had a holiday where people make such evaluations of themselves was a happy coincidence. Again, splitting hairs here, but I’m keeping them distinctive because these aren’t “hey this sounds cool and could still fail because it was made on a whim” decisions, these are lifestyle choices. I’m leveling up again as an author and this is what it’s going to take.

And the third thing I decided was to become more active on social media. How does one decide to become more active you ask? It sounds so structured. But really it’s because my wife is super active, as are many of my friends, and I feel like I’m missing out. I used to post a lot more stuff but I kind of just dropped off over the years.

So bear with me as I get the old Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram machines up and running again. That’ll also most likely be the topic(s) of future posts.

There you have it. Hope the rest of you had some quality rest and relaxation. Did I mention I got to sleep? I had time to think about how to become a better me. Hope you all did as well with or without a holiday prompting you to do so.