Your New Year's Resolutions

1. Spend a regular amount of time each week writing. It doesn't have to be a lot and if doesn't have to be every day, although every day is nice if you can manage it. If you can't, don't sweat it. It can be fifteen minutes every day, or a half hour five days a week, or an hour five days a week, or two hours two or three times a week. Don't try for longer than two hours at a stretch or you will get burned out. The important thing is to make it regular, realistic, and inviolable.

2. Spend a lesser but equally regular amount of time doing the work inherent in getting published - writing your query letter, looking up addresses of places to send your stuff, etc. Fifteen minutes two or three times a week, or an hour once a week, or whatever is, as mentioned above, regular, realistic, and inviolable.

3. Get yourself one resource for your writing that you have been telling yourself costs too much or that you can do without or that you shouldn't really get because you're not a real writer yet (hah!). This can be a book like a Writer's Market book, or a Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) or Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way) book, or a set of new blank books or even a laptop to take to cafes for writing in, or new pens you need, or a new battery for your laptop so you don't always have to get a table with an outlet, or whatever. But spend some money on your writer. He or she deserves it.

Write on!