New Year’s might be my next favorite holiday after Halloween. After being a child who shed tears over every insignificant change, I’ve become an adult who loves a chance to start anew.
I think it began in college, when I discovered that the winter break between semesters allowed me to come back and reorganize my living space and start the next semester far more effectively. Spring semester was almost always better than the fall as a result. If I could reintroduce one aspect of college life into my adult career, it would be the clear endings and beginnings, along with the chance to clean house and start over.
Since graduating college, New Year’s resolutions have become especially dear to me as a launching point for my bigger dreams. In 2019, I was most looking forward to getting the job that would allow me to move out on my own. Since then, my goals have continued to evolve, and this year will follow in that same pattern.
But instead of giving a list of my specific New Year’s resolutions, I’d like to zoom out and show you the big picture of the dream that directs my actions as a writer. Writing is such a vast and varied field that blazing your own trail is a daunting undertaking, and it’s easy to dissipate your energy in a thousand different directions without achieving any meaningful progress. Therefore, it is important to stop and get your bearings from time to time. Today, I would like to draw the biggest version of the map in order to give myself some sense of where I’m going. My resolutions themselves can be specific steps in that direction.
So as fanciful as it seems, today I’m simply going to describe a dream.
The Work
More than anything, I want to spend most of my time writing. I want to produce a ridiculous number of pages over the course of a week, from inspiration and research to actual pen-to-paper stories and blog articles. I want to indulge every interest that beckons, diving in and bringing back interesting ingredients that germinate into stories.
I want to spend eight hours a day (in aggregate, not glued to my desk like a clock puncher) working on everything that an author’s life requires. But I’d love to hire someone to do the public relations and marketing-type work. I’m not good at pitching myself, so in my dream, I’d be able to pay someone else to do that.
I’d love to travel to do speaking engagements either about my work or career or on other topics, like self-publishing and mental health. (I’d simply prefer if someone else did the pitching and planning and told me when and where to go.) I’d be happy to sign copies and chat with fans or other writers looking to make their way in the industry.
The Lifestyle
I want the ability to live a creative life. I see myself getting into a sustainable rhythm of creation, enough to be churning out a book every year or two, plus a bunch of side pieces or background works in progress.
I would plan trips all over the world for inspiration, visiting places that set my wheels turning. I’d do research, learn languages, and annoy the beans out of people who have the knowledge base I need.
When at home, I would live in a cottage with my cats and possibly a husband, with a vegetable garden and flowering vines growing up the outside walls.
I’d spend lots of time painting and messing around in other visual media to help me think and rest, without worrying excessively about the cost of materials. I’d cook and bake and enjoy keeping my home, but also spend the days lying on the ground staring at the sky that are required to fuel such creative endeavors.
The Results
One of the clearest signs of my idea of success as an author is fan art. If you’ve touched someone’s heart and life enough for them to lovingly labor over an image or scene of one of your characters, you’ve accomplished what I consider my mission in life. So that’s what I dream of. That, and all the hubbub that goes with it: readers who share rambling posts digging into the meaning and deeper lives of my characters, fans who waylay me at events with long trains of thought, and little harmless disagreements between camps of shippers and other opinionated folk.
When I picture my ideal career, I want the focus to be on my stories, not on me. I don’t want to be a celebrity, though I would enjoy occasionally making the rounds as a speaker, presenter, etc. I want people to bug me for the next book, make little text posts of quotes from my work, and scratch the itch of the human need for a rollicking good tale.
And when I reach the end of my career and my life, I want to feel like I left it all on the field. I want to know deep down that I didn’t leave a single meaningful story inside me unwritten. I want to pursue every intriguing thread until I’ve built up an eclectic gallery of my thoughts, from which future generations can glean anything hopeful, useful, or joyful to them.
I’m not sure where the painting of this picture of my dream life leaves me, but I intend to use it as a sort of vision board. My primary conclusion is simply that I need to become a powerhouse of writing. I’ve got tons of ideas, and today is the day to get them out of there. It will be so much easier to move forward in my career when I’ve produced enough work to show the world who I am. Ideally, the sales and subscriptions will build from a little drip-drop of cash flow in the meantime to a steady stream, and eventually I’ll be able to afford the fullest version of my dream.
So in this new year (or upcoming year, as it is when I write this), I come empty-handed except for hope and a willingness to forge ahead.
Here’s to you, here’s to me, and here, as always, is to what could be.
