Post-Christmas, Pre-New Year

--While the rest of the world is making resolutions, I'm seeing movies!

--Often I only see movies during holiday stretches, and often only when someone else suggests it.  Yesterday, my mom and dad and I saw American Hustle.  Today we'll see Inside Llewyn Davis.  American Hustle was quite good, the kind of film that bears re-watching.

-Reports of the death of the movie may be premature.  For more on why moviemaking may change but is still essential, see this great article by A.O. Scott from The New York Times.

--Here's the most interesting part of that article:  "Equally hard to refute is the idea that we are approaching a horizon of video convergence, in which all those screens will be equal and interchangeable and the distinctions between the stuff that’s shown on each one won’t seem as consequential as it does now. We still tend to take for granted that a cable drama, a network sitcom, a feature film, a web video and a first-person combat game are fundamentally different creatures, but they might really be diverse species within a single genus, their variations ultimately less important than what they have in common. They are all moving pictures, after all, and as our means of access to them proliferate and recombine, those old categories are likely to feel increasingly arbitrary and obsolete. The infrastructure of a multiplatform future is before us, and resistance to it can look like an especially tiresome kind of sentimentality. Cinephilia is nostalgia. We might keep going to the movies out of habit, or because it’s sometimes nice to leave the house, but we are losing the old, sustaining belief that this is a special and exalted cultural activity, the supreme mode of participation in the popular arts."

--Scott says this convergence will be good for movies and narrative storytelling of all sorts.  Could that also be true for print books?

--It is interesting to be watching in a movie theatre in a group.  The audience behaved well.  The movie wasn't too loud.

--Sunday, the noise in my little house was too much to bear; my spouse played a Jim Reeves Christmas CD that isn't one of my favorites--very Lawrence Welky.  My spouse sang along, but not quite along.  There was dinner prep noise and talking.  I decided to go for a walk.

--I wondered what would happen if I just kept walking and didn't come back.  How long before someone noticed I was gone?  Would anyone notice?  Would they care?  I was in danger of sinking into maudlin, poor-pitiful-me thoughts. 

--But then an older man on a bike rode by.  He had an iPod playing.  Neil Young's lyric, "Old man take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you" drifted on the evening breeze.  I had to smile.  Did he realize the irony?  Had he been listening to this song since he was a young man?  I assume so.  He is now that old man of the Neil Young song--does he know it?

--And here I am, still in midlife, not quite old, not quite young, headed to the other side of midlife.  I have been thinking of Marge Piercy's blog posts which I started reading yesterday.  I'm impressed with how many poems she writes in a given week.  I'd like to write more poems this year.  Could I do one a day?  Could that be my goal without it being oppressive?

--My goal has been a poem a week, and I'm often good at that.  But if I miss a week or two, it's easy to lose a whole month.  I still end up with an impressive number of poems at the end of the year, but I do wonder what ideas slip away.

--To that end, this morning I captured in a poem an idea that almost slipped away, an idea captured in a Facebook post:  deadheading the marigolds on Christmas morning.

--Yes, more writing this year.  I have wasted too much time.

Inspirations and Goals: 2014

This could be the year we get our projects done!  OK, maybe just one project, the one that's nearest and dearest to our hearts.

If you need inspiration, turn to this post. British musician James Rhodes reminds us: "Do the maths. We can function - sometimes quite brilliantly - on six hours' sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can't even smoke?"

A call to arms!

Surely we can find an hour a day, several times a week, to get our creative work done.  I've recently had an epiphany.

I finally plugged in my laptop, and because my brother-in-law has been in the guest room where I usually write, I've been writing at the dining room table.  The dining room-kitchen-living room flow is open, and so, I can write while my spouse watches TV, I can write while he practices his violin, I can write while my spouse and his brother eat.  I can participate in the discussion and then return to the writing.

It's very different from being shut away in an office.  And I realize that I'm lucky, in that I can work on writing projects while life swirls around me.  I don't need absolute quiet.  I can be distracted for a bit, and then get back to work.

Since my brother-in-law arrived two weeks ago, I've gotten more work done on my memoir project than I've gotten done in the past 6 months.  It will be interesting to see what I will have managed to accomplish by this time next year.

I want to have my memoir finished and polished and as perfect as I can make it.  By summer, I want to be sending queries to agents.

It's time to revisit a book-length manuscript of poems.  Instead of separating out the religious material, I'll put in the best of my religious poems, the best of my apocalyptic poems, the best of my modern life poems.  It may mean that some of my individual poems from the early years of this century don't find a home where they live together.

Or maybe those cold war/end of the cold war poems should be a chapbook.  Now that's an interesting idea--all the nuclear stuff that's beginning to feel dated, as I spend more time worrying about sea level rise, maybe it's not a book with a spine, but a chapbook.  Hmmm.

My best writer friend in South Florida tells me that my short stories are ready for publication.  It's time to think about which ones go in the linked collection, and which ones don't make the cut.  I'm so bad a compiler in that aspect.  Once I've committed to finding the individual pieces (short stories, poems, blog posts, whatever) a home, it's hard for me to say, "Nope.  Not good enough for the larger collection."  It's hard for me even to say, "Nope.  Doesn't fit with the larger vision."

Those are my larger goals, along with my smaller goals, to write a short story every 6-8 weeks, to write a new poem every week, to blog daily.

James Rhodes reminds us of what can be done, even if we don't have much time:  "What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you've always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?"

He's talking in piano terms, but the lesson holds true across a variety of artistic forms and disciplines of all sorts (just 40 minutes of exercise each and every day would work wonders; 40 minutes of veggie eating would mean we'd easily consume the 5-9 servings each day that would make us so healthy; 40 minutes of quality time with friend/lover/spouse/child would deepen our relationships; 40 minutes of volunteering would leave the world a better place . . . on and on I could go).

That's my plan, and I post it here:  40 minutes of writing, 40 minutes of veggie eating, 40 minutes of exercise, 40 minutes of paying attention to humans face-to-face, 40 minutes of good deeds.  Let's see what I can do.