Goodbye, 2012

I adore New Years resolutions.

I love thinking ahead, deciding on what I want to accomplish for the year, and breaking those big goals down into smaller, more action-able steps that can make them happen. I love assessing my life in the past year and deciding how to shake things up in the year to come. Goals give me a sense of purpose and excitement.

And I know New Years is an artificial construct. But I still love that sense of another chance. Last year’s failures can stay in last year. Now it’s time for a brand new, sparkly-clean new year—and all the successes that may come.

Last year, my dear friends Angel and Genn and I all got together and made up our big, audacious list of goals for 2012. I was just looking over mine. Here’s a glance at my old list from last year, and how I did.

1. Get my novel agent-ready by the end of 2012. If I look at it one way, this was a pretty big failure. My novel isn’t agent-ready yet. To be fair, though, I only had the first draft about a third of the way finished by the end of last year—and this was a bigger task than I planned. It always is. What I do have is about sixty pages that I’m really happy with—I’m finally learning how to edit in a way that makes huge improvements over my crappy first drafts. (My first drafts are so crappy it’s legendary.) So I’ll have to roll this goal over to 2013.

2. Write a song on my guitar by the end of this year. I took a few guitar lessons, but I didn’t write a song. My guitar hasn’t seen a lot of action in the past few months, unfortunately. Fail on this one.

3. Get my acting career going. Here’s where I had some success this year. I did a ton. New headshots, new commercial print portfolio, new commercial and dramatic acting reels, new website. Also! I was on Celebrity Ghost Stories, played a lesbian with OCD in a student film, and did some modeling. There’s still a lot more work to do in this area, but things are finally, finally moving.

4. Get on a salsa dance team. Fail on this one. But I’m taking private lessons to get in touch with my inner salsa vixen. Getting in touch with my inner vixen was apparently an important goal last year.

5. Read one nonfiction book per month. I’m pretty sure I failed at this one. I kind of stopped counting. But I did read a lot this year. One of my favorites for the year was Iced by Karen Marie Moning.

6. Do Nano 2012. Fail on this one too. This was actually the first year in a few that I haven’t done Nano. I may not do it next year, either. The thing is, I have steaming-pile-of-poo drafts from several consecutive Nano’s clogging up my hard drive—I need to get those in agent shape before I start something new.

7. Submit to 10 poetry magazines by the end of the year. Get one chapbook ready by the end of the year. Make finals in a slam competition. Poetry is like church to me. I feel a deep, almost spiritual satisfaction from writing it and reading it. But I don’t get to church that often these days, unfortunately. I keep trying things to jumpstart my involvement in poetry—none of these worked. I didn’t do any, although I did write a small handful of new poems.

8. Go to one French meetup per month. I actually didn’t do so badly here—I went to seven all year. But I also traveled to France twice. That’s got to count for like, five more, right?

9. Go to seven knitting group meetups per year. I went to four. So that was a fail. But the underlying purpose here was to widen my friend base in New York. And I’ve done that. I feel much more stable and secure in my friendships here this year than I did last year. So indirect win.

 So to recap my year. The most important goals to me were acting and noveling. Acting saw a lot of success, and so did noveling—although it’s not progressing as quickly as I’d like. As for the smaller goals, I’m still not fluent in French. I’m still not poet-laureate material, and I still can’t play the guitar. But that’s what 2013 is for.