Writing work resolutions for 2015

I’m finally back to real work after a nice long new year’s holiday rest. And it’s about time. Of course I didn’t stay exactly idle. I’ve thought long and hard about how to proceed with my writing life this year, and I’ve made a preliminary list. I’m sure I’ll add more things in the weeks and months to come.

• Keep slugging away at my novel revisions. I’m about to start Chapter Six only Twenty-one chapters to go. In other words I’m on page forty-one of one hundred and seventy-nine single-spaces pages. It’s going to be a long haul.
• Write blog pieces for Choices that are more about my writing work and writing advice for others.
• Write for other websites: Naturally Savvy, Aging Bodies, and Cate Russell-Cole’s CommuniCATE Resources for Writers website. I feel so honored that she asked me help her out while she works on her own memoir.
• Write more poetry. In the last few months I’ve let my poetry writing go by the wayside in favor of working on my novel that’s not good for my soul.
• Start working seriously on the poems with images project I’ve started with Keith Alan Hamilton, creator of The Hamilton Gallery and the Keith Alan Hamilton blog, and Nature~IQ Let’s Survive, Not Die book series. I’ve already sent him a few of my poems with images. Here is an example:

Hippo Rock

I find familiar faces
and forms in the rocks
lying around the Serengeti.
Big noses, short necks
from which shoulders
and arms bent at the elbow
seem to appear.
Lions and leopards
perch upon them
for warmth and protection
their colors meld perfectly together.

Just this morning I saw
a hippo rock lying comfortably
at the Mara River’s edge
as droves of wildebeest
raced down the cliff like a stampede
and swam on each other’s backs
as they crossed.
Using smaller rocks to scamper
up to the other side
they left the hippo rock alone.