Starting Right and Keeping On

I don't exactly do New Year's Resolutions.

I plan at the beginning of the year, because it's the summer holiday in New Zealand, so I have some time to think, and it's also before the start of the school year. The school year is the calendar that's ruled most of my life - while my parents were teachers, then when I was in school/at university, then as a teacher myself.

I come by my nerdery honestly. The longest stretch I have spent without some connection to formal education is fifteen months and I figure when I retire from dayjob teaching I'll probably try a PhD again.

Anyway, New Year's Resolutions of the "do X, Y times a week" variety are nearly always doomed to failure, and even more so are the ones that rely on factors other than the self ("win an award!") or involve punishing or restricting yourself in some way ("lose X amount of weight!")

But! I do like doing things, and having an idea of what those things might be is a good place to start. So this year, I created a 2025 Bingo Card:

If this image is hard to read I'm about to talk about it below.
No alt text because I'm about to talk about it below.

There are five categories: House, Writing, Food, Leave House, and Sewing/Clothes.

House:

  • Make new curtains. (Done!)
  • Maintain container garden. (Underway, and flourishing!)
  • Put up art.
  • Replace taps.
  • Replace range hood.

The taps are because every time someone comes over I have to warn them to use the hot tap only in the bathroom please because the cold tap drips incessantly and refuses to stop for literally days. The range hood blew a fuse. Both of these things happened two years ago, and you'll never guess, I have been been doing this dayjob part-time/writing full-time thing for two years.

My new kitchen curtains, a hectic large floral print on a dark blue background with the sunlight glowing etherally through the fabric
Curtains!
Basil, sage, coriander, parsley, some flowers I can't remember, and four courgette plants (3.5 courgette plants too many)
Garden!

Writing:

  • Finish Olympus Inc.
  • Launch Sparks & Recreation.
  • Apply for a residency/grant.
  • Special edition Kickstarter.
  • Five book year.

Over the break, I wrote two-thirds of The Love Labyrinth, which is going to be an Olympus Inc. gift to newsletter subscribers (tell your friends!) and a Kindle novella for anyone else. I nobly and purposefully tore myself away from that to write the first third of Magician First Class, the first Sparks & Recreation book, and then I even more nobly tore myself away from that to begin XO, Xena, the final Olympus Inc. novel.

This might look like dilettantism, but what I was actually doing was giving myself a headstart on projects that have no due date, then refocusing on a project that does. Because XO, Xena is coming out in June, and in January that feels like aaaages away, it would have been very easy for me to spend the holidays kind of poking at it and not getting many words on the screen. Instead, I wrote 35k of words that will be a nice bonus for later and started XO, Xena with plenty of time in hand.

(It was not easy to leave my Magician First Class protag running away from hostile people at a construction site, but Charlie's a surprisingly tough kid. She'll be fine.)

Will it be a five book year? Will I screw myself to the sticking place of Kickstarter management/grant application writing? We'll find out! I am finalising my actual formal business plan for the year, but this is bingo! Dream big!

Food:

  • Try five new ingredients (so far: pomegranate seeds, black rice, gelatin)
  • Host an "at home".
  • Try five new cocktails.
  • Make an entremet (I have made THREE entremet! They're complicated, but fun)
  • Try five new recipes (Yup! Three entremet, a confetti salad with pomegranate seeds, and a chicken, sage, wine and cream thing which is brain-meltingly good)
ENTREMET. A dome, cut in half, showing a pink raspberry mousse, coconut milk panna cotta, lemon curd gelee, and shortbread base
Entremet!

Leave House:

  • Do a class where you move. (Probably a pole or dance class, which will double as research!)
  • Monthly live theatre. (I went to Titanic in the Botanical Gardens, which was 85 mins of delightful crowd work and comedy and 5 mins of genuine pathos as we were reminded that oh yeah this was an actual disaster that killed real people. I loved it.)
  • Go to a movie. (Karen, why is this a goal on a bingo card, you say? Surely you go to movies! Friends, the only movie I have gone to in the past four years is Barbie. Every now and then I think, oh yeah, I could go to a movie, and then I don't. I know. I'm sure Wicked was great.)
  • Sing in public. (Waiata for formal events don't count, or I'd have knocked this off yesterday.)
  • Hit up five new walks.
A new (to me) walk along the estuary

Sewing/Clothes:

  • Finish or chuck incomplete projects. (I sorted these out, and indeed chucked a lot, so the unfinished project pile is now a neat and tidy single plastic bin instead of three sprawling heaps.)
  • New socks. Fun socks. (Really just here to prevent me from buying black crew socks at the supermarket because it's easy)
  • Donate or chuck unworn things.
  • Frocktober.
  • Make things for friends.

BINGO:

Do I think I'll do all 25 of these things? Probably not. But I think I'll do a lot of them, and I may well get bingo. I'll let you know.

Honestly, it looks like it's going to be a really hard year for a lot of people. I know many, including myself, are striving to find ways to maintain hope and connection, and this bingo card is one of mine.

Whether you are making resolutions or not, whether you have a bingo card taped to your calendar or not, whether you are making plans or making calls or wrestling with despair at the state of the world and the endangered people upon it, I hope you will treat yourself well.

If this is to be a bad year, I hope that it can also be a year in which we find moments of grace, kindness, joy and resistance.

I'm here. You're here. The most we can do is our best, and that goes a long, long way.

That Healey Girl is the newsletter of Karen (or Kate) Healey, a romance and speculative fiction author who lives in Ōtautahi, New Zealand and shakes plots loose by wandering along the river. Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might like it!