So I don’t do resolutions. It’s not really a conscious thing anymore, I just don’t do them. Part of it is not wanting to set myself up for failure, part of it is not having a whole lot of focus in my life in general, and part of it just laziness. Of course there are things that I will try to do over the course of the year, and here are a few of them.

1) Lose weight. Like most Americans, I’m overweight. I could be comfortable around 225 lbs., which would be fine if I didn’t weight 275 lbs. currently. So I want to lose at least 40-50 pounds this year. I’ve done it before, as recently as 2007, so I know what it takes, I just have to get off my fat ass and make it a priority. I’m an obsessive type, so if I can work it into one of the obsessions, I’ll be able to get the weight off. Keeping it off may be a goal for another year, though. Making long-term lifestyle changes aren’t easy, especially when the lifestyle you’re in is one born of laziness.

2) Write more. I want to create at least one poem each week in 2010. That would be 52 pieces at the end of the year, and that’s a decent body of work for a year. And if I continue to revise and rewrite as I generate new stuff, I’ll have plenty of work to submit. Which leads to my next goal, which is to submit more. The only path to success as a writer seems to be to write a bunch, submit a bunch, and get rejected a bunch. If I don’t put in the time to submit, I don’t even take the shot at publication. So in addition to creating one poem each week, I’d like to do one submission for publication each month, and if possible, enter one contest each month. The contests are a little more iffy, because there might not be that many contests I think I’m a good fit for, but we’ll give it a shot. I did two submissions last week, one for an anthology locally and one for a national website. I should hear back from those in the next couple of months.

3) Spend better time with Suzy. She’s got some health issues that we’re addressing this year, and I want to make sure I schedule our time together better. It’s important to me that we eat together whenever possible, and now that the new year has started and I’m not on my “all about me” kick that I spent the holidays on (yeah, even more than usual), I want to make sure that when I’m home in the evenings that we spend some time together. With the time I spend in Atlanta and the travel I do for the rest of my job, I want to make sure that the time I spend at home is focused on us being together. Not that we won’t necessarily have our own time in the evenings, just when she doesn’t have anything going on, I don’t want to play video games or poker and ignore her.

4) Get my poker game back on track. I have a couple of ideas as to what is off-kilter in my game, and I think I know how to fix them. I didn’t log a win this weekend at BadBlood’s, but I think with a few notable exceptions I played pretty well. And on one of the notable exceptions I got lucky and won anyway. I need to take apart a few pieces of my game, and I’ll be working on that in the coming weeks and months. If I can get on a good streak online I may even make a withdrawal from Full Tilt and play a WSOP event this summer, but don’t hold your breath there. I say that every year, and every year I either lose focus and blow my online roll, or I decide that it’s not a good investment of my time and money and pull the plug before I register.

5) Work on my photography. I have a decent camera, and I’ve taken some nice shots this year, now I need to focus more on learning how to use all the settings on the camera and get the most out of it. I think I have a good eye, and my experience with lighting design helps in composition, but I’ve got a long way to go before I have anything marketable.

So those are some things I’m going to focus on this year, as well as coming up with a way to disseminate my poetry without it fouling the “unpublished” status and wrecking my chances of having it accepted somewhere. Because I do want to share the stuff I’m writing with you guys, but I don’t want to screw myself out of publication opportunities, either. So once I figure that out, I’ll let you know.

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