I'm four months in to my new job, my work trip to Boston has come and gone, my in-laws are back in Iowa, and I'm learning to stop working at a reasonable hour each night so that I have time to spend with my husband and son, and maybe do a little housework so that I don't have to do it over the weekend. That all means that I'm out of excuses.
I've decided to set some mid-year resolutions to work toward some longer term goals: lose weight, be more engaged with my family and spend more time writing for myself, not my job. These are my resolutions: 1) Exercise for at least 30 minutes every day. 2) Snack less (or replace pretzels with fruit). 3) Work less, play more. 4) Spend a few minutes each night on a worksheet or practice reading with my son so that he doesn't forget everything he learned in kindergarten over the summer. 5) Schedule more dates with my husband. 6) Write, write, write, write, write.
I've been reading a lot, so much so that I can't even remember everything I've read. I've burned through the "Beautiful Creatures" series, made it to the last of the paperback books in the "Fallen" series, re-read the first and sped through the second book in the "Divergent" series, laughed and cried through John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars" (read it now if you haven't read it), started and quickly stopped "Swamplandia," read the short and sweet "The Girl Who Chased the Moon," and the list goes on and on.
Right now, I'm reading "The Street Sweeper" by Elliott Perlman. It's pretty literary for me. I feel like I should love it, but so far he's flipping back and forth between characters so much that I wish he'd chose a story line and stick with it. I'm 100-plus pages into the 617-page novel and can't decide if I should continue on, so I keep reading more, hoping that it will grow on me. I'm still waiting.
For tonight, I'm not going to work on any of my own novels, because I'm too tired to write. At least I've written something here after a month-long hiatus. That's an accomplishment, relatively speaking, anyway. It's a start!
