Happy New Year

Tonight we will be snuggling in our cozy abode with a roaring fire and the white lights on the Christmas tree providing holiday ambiance for the last time before the tree, ornaments and other decorations are packed away on New Year’s Day in keeping with our tradition.

This is the time of year when we feel nostalgic and spend a few moments evaluating our journey thus far. I have never been one to make resolutions because I have a rebellious nature which means that I long to abandon those resolutions as soon as I decide upon them. Instead, I have learned over the years to make mini-resolutions on an ongoing basis — and not announce them to those around me!

As usual, 2007 seems, in hindsight, to have been both interminably long and to have elapsed in a nanosecond. Far greater writers than I have tried to analyze and explain the phenomenon we refer to as the passage of time with little or no success. But I’m confident that you can relate.

I experienced a number of life-changing events in 2007. The highlights: I left organized religion in January, played Carnegie Hall in March, supported my husband through surgery for a burst appendix in May, met and studied with one of my heroes, Sir James Galway, in July. In July and August, I transferred my blogs from Blogger to WordPress and converted all of my static websites to WordPress-powered blogs. Late in the year, I took over management of the Carnival of Family Life and changed jobs. I did a fair amount of traveling, including, in addition to a week in New York City, a few days in Seattle visiting a good friend. Along the way, I lost about 75 pounds that I pray I will never, ever find.

No wonder I was ready for a vacation by the time my birthday rolled around on December 21!

So what’s in store for 2008? Hopefully, articles that interest, entertain and, hopefully, enlighten you a bit. I’ve felt that too much of my writing has been “fluff” and I want to work on more substantive material in the coming year. The challenge is, of course, finding the time to thoroughly research, draft and edit the kind of articles I am really interested in publishing. My statistical analyses for 2007 show that the most popular articles I published were either on the topic of blogging / writing or about current events such as the controversy surrounding the publication of O.J. Simpson’s “hypothetical” account of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

Every year I tell myself that I am going to give writing fiction a try and every year I abandon the idea without ever writing a single word. Will 2008 be different? I could tell you it will, but I’m quite confident that I would be lying. Even though a lot of folks have encouraged me to give fiction a whirl, I just don’t believe that I can ever be even a mediocre, much less competent, author of fictional works. And if I don’t believe it, I will never make any readers believe it.

Please leave a comment and let me know what topics you’d like to see addressed in 2008. What’s on your mind? What aspects of writing most interest you? Conversely, what topics or issues do you think should be avoided and why?

I wish you all a very happy New Year’s celebration and much joy!