Out With The Old, In With The New/Cool As The Other Side Of The Pillow

Happy 2015, y'all!

Yeah, I know, I'm about two weeks late.  Couldn't be helped.  My December was kind of epic.  I watched my best friend get married, moved into a new apartment, worked like a psychopath, had Christmas Eve Dinner, made Christmas Morning French Toast, had Christmas dinner, unpacked my last box just a couple of hours before getting trashed on New Year's Eve.  I needed a break.

But here we are, on the other side in 2015.  This is the year that we're supposed to have our hoverboards and the Chicago Cubs win the World Series (I'd bet on the hoverboard coming first).  It's a year full of promise, of expectation, of ambition.  Or of the same old resolutions.  Whatever.

I'm sure we've all made the promise to be better off financially, to be better with our significant others, and the promise that this will finally be the year we get healthy.  I know I did.  I think I made those promises last year, too.  Oops.

To be fair though, last year was awesome, for me at least.  I got to knock some items off my personal bucket list.  I did a small book tour for my novel The Favorite (shameless plug).  I did three book signings and a reading.  I got to see something I wrote on the shelves in a bookstore.  And it won an award.  I'm almost sad to see 2014 go in that sense.

2015 though, that's going to be a monster.  I'm going to finish the manuscript I've been working on for the last three-plus years (thanks NaNoWriMo).  I'm going to master this tricky marketing thing.  I'm going to bust my hump to do a quarter-million words of fiction this year (down from last year's million because, well, damn).  I'm going to read and review one book per month.  And I'm going to interview independent writers, artists and musicians as often as I can.  And I'm going to use this blog.  A lot.

Happy New Year.

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I'd like to take this moment to give a shout out to the late ESPN anchor Stuart Scott who died last week of a particularly persistent cancer.  Mr. Scott, besides being a beacon of professionalism and having a style that is often imitated and never duplicated, was by all accounts a badass in the face of his diagnosis, training in MMA fighting while working and doing chemotherapy right up until the end of his life.  He is a legend in his own time and an inspiration to this writer.  After all, if a man facing terminal cancer can not only be at the top of his profession AND train his body in combat, then there is no reason why a healthy person like myself can't do anything they set their mind to.