When this post was first drafted several weeks ago, I was full of inspiration and possibility. That’s the effect the Christmas and New Year period has on me! Having recently read the January issue of Writing Magazine, I could feel my energy levels rising and the sense that with a few tweaks to my current, non-existent writing life, I would be able to make real progress with my work-in-progress. Many thanks to Adrian Magson for his inspirational article Write Time, with the subtitle ‘If writing matters to you, find time for it’!

So I used my commute to work one morning to put down my thoughts and list my writing resolutions for 2012. It felt good, it really did. I was preparing to put aside my usual excuses – ‘I’m tired’ and ‘I don’t have time’ – to crack on with the project-otherwise-known-as-Book-Two). I had set myself several challenging tasks for the year, including blogging more frequently, finishing Book Two and perhaps considering self-publishing Book One (you see, deciding something like that will take me a while!)

However, within several hours, circumstances conspired against me, and I realised that the New Year was not going to start as I’d hoped. So like any good writer, I decided to do a second draft of the post. Instead of being relaxed and having extra time to devote to writing in the next couple of months, I’m once again facing a slightly uncertain future – and this is not something I find easy to cope with. Can I write in a slightly stressed state? History would tell us I can’t, so I’ve abandoned my previous ‘four-resolution’ system for just one resolution: learn how to write whatever the circumstances. Or instead, perhaps, stop treating writing as something I have to do and make it back into something I’d walk over red-hot coals to do.

Will this work? To be quite frank, I’m not sure, but I’m going to give it my best shot. That could be another resolution couldn’t it? Stop being so half-hearted about everything and recapture my passion for life.

(I’m also going to try and keep the ‘blog more often’ resolution too, but it’s unofficial and therefore doesn’t count if I break it, so shhhh don’t tell anyone!)

So, that’s my plan for 2012 when it comes to writing. What are your plans? Do you set resolutions and what do you do to make sure you keep them?