Happy New Year! I'll bet you have a great New Year's resolution that you plan to keep!
The last time I made a resolution was in 2000. I figured that it was a monumental year with the changing over to a new millennium, and that deserved a kick-ass resolution.
So I resolved to conquer a real fear. I sat and thought hard ... what was a real fear that I could tackle and have results to show for it?
I decided that one fear was horses.
I took horseback riding lessons for the first four months of 2000. For the first month, I was so frightened that my instructor literally held the horse's bit and led me around and around a pen, like I was 5 years old.
By the last month, I had progressed to trotting and even staying on the back of the horse when it reared its legs. I'll never be an expert, because truthfully, I never took to it like some people do. But I did cross that resolution off my list as a "mission accomplished."
I haven't made a resolution since then .... until this year, 2013.
I came to a difficult realization that I was spending much too much time on Twitter. It was time to rock the boat.
So I have resolved this:
Every time I feel the nudge to tweet or spend an inordinate amount of time perusing tweets, I will work on writing my book. I'm going to keep an open Word doc on my computer so that I can go straight to it and just write until the urge is gone. I haven't even started this book. But that's the point. I thought to myself, "I'll bet I spent so much time on Twitter in 2012, that I could have finished a book in the time that I was tweeting."
Will it sell?
At this point, I don't really care.
I just want to be able to say ... in my life, I was a newspaper reporter, I was an AP wire service reporter, I was a newspaper editor, I was a magazine freelance writer .... AND I WROTE A BOOK.
Just one book.
Let's see if I can get it done this year. It doesn't mean I'll shelve Twitter completely, but I do need to get my life back in balance.
The last time I made a resolution was in 2000. I figured that it was a monumental year with the changing over to a new millennium, and that deserved a kick-ass resolution.
So I resolved to conquer a real fear. I sat and thought hard ... what was a real fear that I could tackle and have results to show for it?
I decided that one fear was horses.
I took horseback riding lessons for the first four months of 2000. For the first month, I was so frightened that my instructor literally held the horse's bit and led me around and around a pen, like I was 5 years old.
By the last month, I had progressed to trotting and even staying on the back of the horse when it reared its legs. I'll never be an expert, because truthfully, I never took to it like some people do. But I did cross that resolution off my list as a "mission accomplished."
I haven't made a resolution since then .... until this year, 2013.
I came to a difficult realization that I was spending much too much time on Twitter. It was time to rock the boat.
So I have resolved this:
Every time I feel the nudge to tweet or spend an inordinate amount of time perusing tweets, I will work on writing my book. I'm going to keep an open Word doc on my computer so that I can go straight to it and just write until the urge is gone. I haven't even started this book. But that's the point. I thought to myself, "I'll bet I spent so much time on Twitter in 2012, that I could have finished a book in the time that I was tweeting."
Will it sell?
At this point, I don't really care.
I just want to be able to say ... in my life, I was a newspaper reporter, I was an AP wire service reporter, I was a newspaper editor, I was a magazine freelance writer .... AND I WROTE A BOOK.
Just one book.
Let's see if I can get it done this year. It doesn't mean I'll shelve Twitter completely, but I do need to get my life back in balance.
