Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Now that we're a few days into 2003, I'm wondering about the whole "New Year's Resolution" thing. I'm not sure if I have any "resolutions", or merely plans that involve things I've been doing all along.

Firstly, there are the traditional "health" related resolutions. I'm waiting to see the anticipated spike in the number of people working out at the gym; there were a lot more names than usual on yesterday's sign-in sheet, but one day doesn't comprise enough of a sample. Getting in shape and eating healthy was my resolution last year, and I've stuck to it, so I'm well on the way to making it a "lifestyle" thing as opposed to a "resolution". I'm still in that "willpower" phase, when I could theoretically dine on a pizza and a pile of chicken wings, so I choose not to rather than not have the option even occur to me because I find it gross. But I'm getting there.

If there is anything I'd actually call a "resolution" for myself this year, it's to finally get going on becoming a freelance writer. It's something I've been kicking around for a number of years, but I've never taken the plunge (obviously). This will probably be the biggest fallout, for me personally, of the year 2002: my ultimate realization that I can't stand working for other people. I've been in management, and I've been a "cubicle drone", and quite frankly, neither camp is any more admirable than the other. Cubicle-drones do tend to be self-centered, and they do need to often be dragged kicking-and-screaming into any kind of teamwork, and they do tend to get so relaxed in the way they've always done things that they recoil in horror at the smallest change in the daily routine. But managers don't know nearly as much as they like to pretend they do; they really do make decisions in a capricious nature, often without a lot of forethought -- or any forethought at all (if you ever have a manager use the sentence "It was a business decision" as justification for a decision, you could bet your life savings that they have no idea why they're doing it other than a whim or hunch), and Sturgeon's Law applies to managers just as surely as it does to cubicle-drones.

So, having decided that I don't care for either horn of the bull, I have decided that I will not enter the arena. Thus, I'm going freelance this year. The only problem is money, and that means getting a job just to secure my initial financing, and then dumping it. (No, I'm not going to admit as much in interviews. I'm not that insane.)

In the arena of my fiction writing, I plan no slowing down in that regard. My goal in 2003 is to produce at least one piece of salable fiction. I'm hoping to sell at least a story or two, and I am so close to finishing the current draft of the novel that I am setting Tax Day -- April 15 -- as my deadline for when I begin shopping the thing around, either to agents or publishers.

As for my reading this year -- as Stephen King says, "Reading is the creative center of the writer's life" -- I want to get cracking on The Brothers Karamazov, and I also want to read The Iliad, The Odyssey, and perhaps revisit some Shakespeare. I'm also devoting a good deal of energy to catching up on science fiction. I read a lot of SF in high school, but I concentrated instead on fantasy during college and afterwards; now I want to return to SF, especially to some of the works on this list (which I wouldn't have seen if not for Scott -- great find!). I've read a number of them, but not as many as I should. Fortunately, I own a bunch of them.

And at last, there is Byzantium's Shores. I hope to move the blog sometime this year to a server with its own domain name, and switch to Movable Type. I would have done it already, except that I didn't want to blog for a while and then quit, so I wanted to see if I was in it for the long haul. I appear to be doing just that, with this site's one-year anniversary (!) little over a month away. I don't have any specific ideas for entries now, except for a series of articles that I want to do honoring the bicentennial of the birth of Hector Berlioz, my favorite classical composer. Other than that, it's "write 'em as they come", which seems to me more satisfying, anyway.

So, bring on 2003!!