I think the following statement is true, and it’s a big part of why I’m doing this writing in 2025:

I am a better writer when I am writing more.

So, although writing this can at times take me away from other writing projects, it is also helping me more in that department than it is taking away from it.

Either it’s keeping me in the habit and routine of writing, or it’s helping me generate ideas to write about, or it’s just the idea that I’m putting words on the blank page, which is sometimes the hardest thing for some projects and kind of helps me past that mental hurdle in other pieces I write. And all of the different parts of this writing help - making the time to watch shows and movies helps inspire me, I’ve talked about how reading helps my writing, and experiencing new things is good for the writing brain as well.

This goal is a tough one because it’s mostly out of my control: I can do the writing, I can do the submitting…but then I have no say on the publishing. So maybe the minor addendum to this goal is to simply submit some pieces for publication.

Why do I have this goal?

Well, it’s been a while.

Years ago, right after I left teaching, getting pieces published was my main source of income. A couple of magazines, newspaper, a bunch of websites…there were some reported pieces, personal essays, and humor writing.

Then I started to get steady freelancing work, which was great for the bank account but not so great for my creative writing.

I had actual assigned writing for a few years that took up a lot of my time, and I didn’t really need to hustle as hard with the submissions.

But I do like doing that - and, well, it couldn’t hurt these days to make a couple of extra bucks.

But really I miss that thrill of someone saying, “Hey, we like this, and we’d like to publish it.”

So I’ve started to go through some of my old pieces - there are some pretty funny ones that I found. I can submit some of those - or in some cases, try submitting them to different places than I originally tried.

And hopefully I get a spark and write some new pieces that I feel good enough about to submit.

You’ll certainly hear from me if something is accepted somewhere.

But I think what might be more important this year is that I revisit at the end of the year exactly how many pieces I tried to submit, where I sent them, and put less emphasis on whether they were accepted pieces or not.