Bring on 2022! Reflections and plans.

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own.

Bring on 2022! Reflections and plans.

It’s important to pause, reflect, and shift routines and goals from time to time throughout the year. It can’t all come down to New Year’s intentions. And yet, there is something to be said for the potential a new year has for giving us permission to imagine our dreams coming true. Here’s a form I created to help you make those plans.

I filled out this form already and it did help me figure out where I’m headed next with my writing. As is usual this time of year, I’d gotten a little off the rails in terms of focus, plus I’d let some doubts creep in that threatened to seriously keep me from moving forward.

What will I be working on in 2022? Sending out queries for a book I wrote called It May Look Like Disaster, working on the second draft of a book called Scripts, and drafting some new short stories for a collection I started recently. That collection is tentatively titled Home Isn’t A Place. I’ve got my schedule tweaked and am ready to relaunch in full Monday 1/3. In the meantime, I’m getting organized and working like a person still on winter break, when I feel like it.

—

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?

 Find free resources and information here.

Some past posts to keep you making time: 

Adjust your pace accordingly.

It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine

There are things you will have to give up

See it to achieve it

Washing the dishes

Write slowly

A celebration of the pause

Monday, a run through the driving rain

Zen accident

Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA in the USA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She has published in Shark Reef, Dual Coast, and Blue Crow Magazine. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.