Happy New Year! (and stuff)

Happy New Year from Sione & Milton

It's the year 2014, and if you add up the numbers (2+0+1+4) they equal seven, and someone once told me that's good luck, so I guess we'd all better prepare for a lucky year this year.

Some people like to set New Year's resolutions. Not me. My New Year's resolution several years ago was to never make another resolution again because I never stick to them, and I've stuck to it ever since. Oh. Wait. Hmm...

Well anyway, instead of making New Year's resolutions I like to have goals. What's the difference? you ask. A resolution is a commitment to doing a certain thing, e.g. Go to the gym 3x a week or Stop swearing in front of the kids, whereas a goal sets an intention in a general direction and is subject to change as my needs/perception of reality changes. Yes, perhaps it is splitting hairs, but it makes me feel better.

My goals this year, in approximate order in which I hope to achieve them:

1. Finish selling the house.
2. Finish my collection of short speculative fiction stories & get most of them published in lit mags/journals.
3. Start working on non-fiction book re: intentional communities.
4. Finish writing pseudonym's WIP1.
5. Go to Europe. Definitely Spain. Possibly two weeks in Germany learning German. Possibly a month in Paris practicing drinking café au lait & speaking French.
6. Finish writing pseudonym's WIP2.
7. Finish collection of poems.
8. Finish writing pseudonym's WIP3.

I also want to continue supporting myself with editing and coaching work, sell some more books, and read at least a book a week for fun, but those are ongoing things and therefore don't fit into my chronological list.

Things I'm reading right now:
Lost Dogs & Monsters by A. D. Bloom (sci-fi novel in a series) - recommended
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (surrealist novel)
Takedown Twenty by Janet Evanovich (humorous mystery novel w/ some romance)
Fjords by Zachary Schomburg (prose poetry) - recommended
Return to the City of White Donkeys by James Tate (prose poetry) - recommended
Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened by Allie Brosh (memoir in comic form) - recommended

Book I just ordered because I decided whilst packing up the house that my anthology containing Russell Edson would go into storage:
The Tunnel: Selected Poems by Russell Edson

And while I was at it:
The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic
Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present, edited by David Lehman

On a side note, the three books I just ordered are ones I used to have access to when I lived with a certain ex-boyfriend several years ago, but he got all the prose poetry books in the breakup. He also got the Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit, the extended versions of all three LotR movies, and my favorite coffee table. I plead temporary insanity.

New goal: Quit letting ex-boyfriends have all the cool shit.

So what are your goals/resolutions for 2014? (I'm particularly interested in the writing-, reading- and travel-related ones.) And what are you reading right now that you'd recommend?