New Year’s Resolution Fail

Like most people, I’m fond of making New Years Resolutions. Like most people, my New Year’s Resolutions are often doomed to failure. However, 2024 probably saw my most spectacular New Year’s Resolution Fail.

The challenge I gave myself was “better time management.” I had become concerned because after years of posting 50+ blog entries, my output in 2023 was a whopping 42 entries. I’d also failed to make progress on a new novel for young readers to follow up on Moonwalking, Torch, and Eyes Open. At the time, I was toying with two different projects, one a YA contemporary and the other a middle grade historical. At the beginning of May 2024 I bought two notebooks, one for each of these projects, to collect character sketches and diaries, timelines, research notes, and other background materials.

One of those notebooks is completely blank. The other one has one page, front and back, listing the main characters, as well as a free-written background scene that depicts how my protagonist ended up injured and on the bench for much of the basketball season. The project for the empty notebook is officially dead, never to be resurrected, even though I’m going to miss the cool names I gave to its protagonist and her younger brother. As I’d feared, I’m too far away from adolescence, adolescent banter, and today’s technology to write a contemporary novel. (I’ll leave that task to my friend Sarah Darer Littman, whose work explores the interaction of teens and technology.) The other problem with writing YA contemporary is that I’m not a fast writer, and until recently, it took a long time for my books to sell to publishers. Stories ripped from the headlines, or with elements drawn from pop culture and current technology, tend to date quickly, as I learned after trying for years to write and sell ANTS GO MARCHING. And the YA contemporary project I’d envisioned was overtaken by events even before I wrote the first word.

So now I’m promising myself I’ll return to the middle grade historical novel, which has the advantage of not being overtaken by events because the events have already happened. And while I didn’t make any progress on a new novel last year, maybe I wrote more blog posts than the 42 that went live in 2023.

Uh…no. My count for 2024 was 36 blog posts, six fewer than the previous year even though 2024 was a leap year with one extra day. My head is hanging in shame, even lower than Texas Longhorns kicker Bert Auburn’s today after missing two easy field goals that would have kept his team out of double overtime. But just as UT pulled out the victory in the end, I have a silver lining. The 36 blog posts that appeared in 2024 garnered more reads than the 42 from the previous year, the 52 in 2022, or the 53 in 2021. Quality over quantity, right?

If you read my posts from this year, you would be right to conclude that obsession over the political situation had a lot to do with my poor time management and level of productivity. I don’t cope well with instability. Many people don’t. When a friend posted the results of her 20024 resolutions and asked others to chime in, several said that political and economic uncertainty was making it hard for them to write. I wrote, “I feel like I’m Exhibit A for why the ordinary citizens of failed states and repressive regimes are notoriously unproductive.” We search for any scraps of news and fret over our fates and that of our communities. Those of us who are targeted by censors wonder how long we’ll be able to write our truths.

At this point, I’m afraid to make a 2025 resolution in case I don’t keep it. But there’s one I want to make, and my record over the years isn’t all fail, all the time. (See, for instance, my 2023 resolution to support my writer colleagues through blurbs, reviews, social media, and word-of-mouth.) Last month, I wrote a piece about not obeying in advance, which among other things means keeping my blog up with all its posts until someone else actually takes it down (like the censors in China who blocked it over my posts supporting Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo). I also plan to follow Timothy Snyder’s advice beyond the first chapter of On Tyranny, which includes things like supporting alternative media and institutions of civil society. I know people complain about The New York Times — and I’ve been known to complain as well over the years — but the Times remains an independently-owned newspaper that deserves all the support it requires to remain independently-owned and a source of journalistic integrity. Having written reviews for the Times and tested mattresses and other items for Wirecutter, I know the lengths they go to in order to maintain that integrity.

Wish me luck! I have a feeling I’ll need it.