We are almost done with the year and I need to think what I want to do with resolutions this year. I am constantly in a state of working on my goals, so Jan 1 shouldn’t be a big thing for me, but this year, I feel like setting some resolutions. I want to get to my goal weight this year. I want to finish Looking for Christ this year. I want to pay off the IRS this year. I don’t know where I’m going to come up with all the money, but I would like it to show up in my life and I want to put it all on payments to the IRS. Maybe my book will sell and I’ll get enough for a book advance to pay off the IRS. That would be really nice. I could just pay them off in one fail swoop. If there was any left over, I would like to buy a house, but that’s not nearly as important to me as just paying off the IRS. Hell, while I’m dreaming, why don’t I dream that Looking for Christ is a runaway best seller and I make millions of dollars from it. I pay the IRS, I buy a house, and I sock the rest away in an interest bearing account. I go on a book signing tour and end up on national television where I become a sudden star. Out of nowhere, suddenly, Laura Moncur’s face is on every magazine and talk show. I can just keep dreaming, but as the wise Dr. Frank-N-Furter said, “Don’t dream it, be it.”

Resolutions aren’t about dreaming. They are about commitment. I am very reserved about what I commit to. That word is so powerful that I really don’t like to say that I’m committed unless I KNOW I can do it. Even when I half-heartedly jumped into NaNoWriMo, I was committed to finishing it. I know I kept telling myself that even if I don’t finish, I got a lot more written than I would have had I not done it, I knew that there was no way that I wasn’t going to finish. I had come too far and watched myself achieve too much to not finish it.

Knowing that I can do so much is such a strange feeling to me because the truth of the matter is that I haven’t been able to write much fiction all month. I know that I can write 3000 words a day, yet I can’t write that much every day. When I write that much, I need to rest. When I write 50,000 in a month, I end up needing to rest almost an entire month. This month has been frustrating for me because I know that I can write 3000 words a day. Not writing for a month is really hard. I don’t know.

What am I committed to doing this year? What will I do, no matter what? Well, I’m getting to my goal weight. There is absolutely no stopping me now. I am going to get there no matter what. I am wholeheartedly committed to getting to a healthy weight once and for all. I can put that one on the list. As of my last weigh-in at Weight Watchers, I weighed 170 pounds. I intend to lose 40 pounds and weigh 130 by October 1st of next year.

I am committed to finishing Looking for Christ. If I don’t get this story out of my head, I will go mad. I am going to write a chapter a week until it’s done. If there are more than 52 chapters left in this book, then it’s too damn long and I need to start editing. I am fully committed to getting a chapter a week out the door in 2005 until the book is done. I already have an idea ripe and ready for outlining for my next book. I need to get that ready and in place for NaNoWriMo next year, but I’m not even sure if I’m willing to commit to NaNoWriMo next year.

We owe the IRS so much money that I really don’t see how I can dig myself out of it. I don’t know what to put on my list of resolutions about it. I don’t know where to start or what baby steps I need to take to get out of it. All I can see is making payments on it every month, but that just feels like a drop in the bucket. Enough drops will get it paid off, eventually, so that’s what I can commit to. I am committed to paying $2500 a month to the IRS every month in 2005. If I can pay more, I will gladly pay more, but for now, all I can imagine is paying that much. Even paying that much makes us watch our finances closely. I guess all I can do is my best, even if it is just a small installment.

That’s it. I can’t commit to anything else. Those three things are all I can focus on. One more thing would send me over the edge and overextend me to the point where failure was guaranteed. When I look at it, they seem like lofty goals: lose all the weight, write a book and pay a huge debt. Yet, I can see how to do each one of them and I have no doubt that each of them is very doable.

Last year, I gave some lame excuse about how I’m always working on my goals, so I don’t need to make New Year’s Resolutions. I did that and here I am, at the same weight I was last year and owing the same amount of money. If I had put it in print what I was going to do and published it to the whole world, I think I would be at my goal weight by now. So, here is the whole story:

Laura’s New Year’s Resolutions: By January 2006,
I will weigh 130 pounds.
I will have finished writing Looking for Christ.
I will have paid at least $2,500 a month to the IRS.