I can’t believe it’s April already. How did this year get away from me?<\/p>\n
I’ll tell you how. Inertia<\/a>. Sir Isaac Newton’s principle that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a writer surfing the web tends to keep clicking links until she realizes it’s four in the afternoon and she hasn’t gotten anything done all day.<\/p>\n Last year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I declared 2010 the year to “do the things you’ve always wanted to do but never have.” I did pretty good, too. Chad and I made a list of all the things that we’ve been saying we wanted to do for years and set a goal to try one new thing a month, either from that list or something spontaneous we came across. I think the only months we didn’t do something new were June and July, when we bought and moved into our new house. (Can’t say buying a house was new; I did that up in Ohio.) But, in the end, I tried a lot of things I wouldn’t have otherwise, like horseback riding<\/a> and going to Castle Carnivale and racing go-carts.<\/p>\n In fact, things went so well that I decided to continue that trend by declaring 2011 the year I created positive inertia. Good habits. Forward motion in everything. I wanted to get in motion and keep moving forward with the things I want to accomplish.<\/p>\n I haven’t done as well as I’d like.<\/p>\n Oh, I’m getting some<\/em> writing done, but I’ve had a lot of days where I haven’t written anything at all. And what writing I am doing is going very slow. Sketching something every day quickly fell by the wayside, and my plans to restore a fountain pen a week got only as far as ordering the Marshall and Oldfield book<\/a>.<\/p>\n I am, to say the least, disappointed in myself.<\/p>\n But I’m not giving up. Instead, I’m starting over and declaring today No More Fooling Around Day. Starting today, I pledge to:<\/p>\n Yeah, I know. That’s a pretty unrealistic list. Am I going to meet every goal? Of course not. There will be days when I don’t get anything written. There will be weeks when I forget to blog. There will be times when I realize, “Sweet raisin danish! It’s Sunday night, and I still haven’t done a science experiment! Uh, where’s the baking soda and vinegar? Look, they bubble! Yay!” But that’s okay. The idea is to push myself to do more, to make myself do the things I’ve been meaning to do.<\/p>\n Because if I don’t push myself, how will I know what I can do?<\/p>\n *******************************<\/p>\n In other news, my friend Gina Penn released a book of short stories called Learning to Fly<\/a>. You should check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can’t believe it’s April already. How did this year get away from me? I’ll tell you how. Inertia. Sir Isaac Newton’s principle that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a writer surfing the web tends to keep clicking links until she realizes it’s four in… Continue reading \n