Happy 2013! No Resolutions. Well, maybe just one.

This is normally when I look back over the previous year and make some resolutions for the new one, but I’m sort of off resolutions. It’s not that I don’t have any goals or good intentions to enumerate. To the contrary, I have many items I’d like to accomplish, improvements I’d like to make, tasks I want to complete. But coming off of 2012, I find I made all my deadlines and am caught up on my urgently outstanding to-do items. Aside from feeling like I should beware the impending Apocalypse, it makes me realize that I haven’t found resolutions all that helpful. When a deadline pops up, I’ll work my ass off to meet it because that’s what I do with deadlines. When a project lands on my plate, ditto ass ditto off ditto just ‘cuz. And I’m fully aware of personal items I’d like to address with an eye towards improvement as they’re largely the same ones dogging me most if not all my life. Me making a list isn’t going to up my motivation or change my work habits, or at least it certainly hasn’t up to this point.

So I’m going to skip the resolution list-making. Instead, I’ll just resolve to do my best, and if/when my best doesn’t pan out the way I’d like, I resolve not to let it get to me.

In lieu of a list of resolutions, herein a rundown of my work published in 2012:

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*reprint
†free fiction

The Red String Slated for Cricket’s February 2012 Issue

Got an email from Debby Vetter, my Cricket editor, sending along the page proofs for “The Red String” and letting me know it’s scheduled to be published in next year’s February issue. Hurray! She also mentioned that this is the last story Cricket has in inventory from me and encouraged me to submit more.

Aside from the thrill of having an editor, y’know, invite me to submit something, it occurs to me that I’d been so focused on the novel effort for the last couple years that I simply haven’t been writing much children’s fiction. And I’ve missed it. Soon as I started poking around in that neglected corner of my creative process, got an immediate story idea, complete with title—”The Girl Who Drew Cats”—as well as a solid opening underway.

So I’m setting aside “The Art of Victory When the Game is All the World” for a bit. Probably good to put a little distance there anyway. “Art of Victory,” in addition to threatening to turn into a novella, is feeling a tad overextended and expansive, both focus- and story-wise. Couple weeks might be exactly what I need to regroup and rein things back under control with it.