Predictifications

If only she'd wise up and starting using TrackBack, I could link you to JFTB's New Year's horoscopish predictions for 2004--obviously, I still can, but without TB, it doesn't leave footprints. If only I'd wise up, and cease my desire to leave footprints.

Anyhow. It's a whole new year, and what is a weblog for if not to indulge myself?

This year, my second book manuscript will get up and running--ideally, not until after my first one has paused for a refreshing trip to a publisher's desk. There will be at least one moment where I feel that this new book can't possibly live up to my hope for it, but I will most likely make the conscious decision to soldier on.

I anticipate at least 2-3 months of superhuman productivity, where I write as much in that span as I have for the past year. 2003 was a much more gradual year for me as a writer, thanks in no small part I suspect to the very page you are currently reading. There will be times, however, where I resist the disapproving glare of the MT calendar and spend my QWERTY on scholarship rather than self-reflection.

There will be a stretch or two of indeterminate length where I feel that I can't possibly hold my life together in the face of depression, despair, and/or disapproval. I will hold it together, though, even as I continue to disagree with the notion that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I will work at rediscovering some of the joy in what I do, and on a related topic, I'll recalibrate my notions of who I am and who I'm becoming.

There are several people that I'll meet this year, at various times, and it will be a source of wonder to me next year at this time that I've only known them for less than a year. At least one of them, I expect, will spur me to reconsider myself fundamentally.

It is unclear to me whether I will make it through 2004 having become more or less certain. Either way, I expect to apologize less for it.

And of course, I've got all the normal things: eat less, exercise more, be smarter about money, waste less time, praise my friends, forgive my enemies, blah blah blah. But that's all stuff I'll either do or not--reflecting and resolving won't really make or break that kind of stuff.

HNY, all.