Today marks the annual ritual of either a) posting about resolutions for the coming year, or b) posting about how one is far too cool to post about resolutions for the coming year. I just realized that I failed to post for the whole of December as well (sorry for the belated comment approval, Justin!), so this particular post will have to do triple duty.

December on the whole was decidedly tricksy, for some of the reasons you might expect and some of the reasons you mightn’t. I had to wrap up work on the fall semester, which is about as predictable as things get, and normally I give myself a week or two off in order to recover, to attend to all the stuff I deferred while grading final exams and essays, and to plot out what I’ll need to tackle when the dust has settled. This year, however, I decided to round the corner with virtually no downtime, as the haps at the Abbey are a little friskier than usual.

The first bit of business involved trying to be a more supportive feller for my partner, for she is launching her own enterprise after a couple of decades working for other folks. I am, alas, a pretty limited critter and not all that useful, but she’s primarily needed a sounding board and accessible ear over the past month. All systems, happily, appear to be go: today she’s moving in to her new office space, and this week she’ll take delivery of scads of furniture and office equipment. She’s omnicompetent and possessed of about 50,311 useful skills–the new business will focus primarily on signmaking for accessibility/wayfinding, but she’s a skilled graphic designer, maker, and creative type who has already made inroads in a variety of industries–but right now she’s dancing on the line between excitement and worry. My only real responsibility is helping her to stay on the right side of that line. So far, so good, at least as far as I can tell.

The second bit of business has involved writing a novella, which was not exactly planned (though an outline and scattered bits and bobs have been haunting my desktop for a long time). My compositional process is more than a little involved, but I’ve managed to formalize and finalize the lion’s share of a first draft. I’ll need to polish things off, drop the manuscript in the hopper, and revise it a week or two later with fresh eyes, but it should be ready to send out into the galaxy by mid-January. And then I can turn to the twenty-odd starter documents that are also littering my desktop: premises, outlines, and fragments of poems and short stories that have been on hold while I focused on putting the novella to bed.

I’m fairly fond of resolutions–any occasion make a fresh start on things, or to see old things in a new way, has value–but I’m not especially good at formulating them or articulating them. This year, however, I think I’ll aspire to work through more projects from start to finish, and to get items off my docket sooner rather than later. The Shawty, my partner, is going to need plenty of support as she works out the kinks of her business, and I think I’ll be better equipped to provide it if my own nogginspace is reasonably clear. So here’s to that, and here’s to you. Thanks for reading, and good luck to you on all the promises you plan to keep in 2023!