It’s been a few days since people all around me in the neighborhood seemed determined to blast 2020 into smithereens and it’s time to consider the new year and things to do this year. However, I suck at New Year’s resolutions so I am not going to call them that. Is there a better term? Goals perhaps? No, that sounds too pretentious…as if I get a medal or a diploma once I fulfill something. There are no medals…or diplomas (unless I create them myself).

I have thought a little bit though about stuff I want to do this year though, creatively. As people who follow me on Instagram and/or Facebook may have noticed I have continued to do a 365 project into the brand spanking new year we call 2021. The idea is to once again upload an image per day all the way to December like I’ve done in the last few years. It is a nice way to keep your photo brain cell going EVERY day (even if I may not shoot an image every day at least I get to share one every day).

I’ve put together my completed 365 projects into books for myself, and I put together some travel books a long time ago (traveling…remember what that was like when we could do that stuff?), but I think this year I need to come up with a new thing to do with a collection of photos that tell a story. I want to put together a zine of some sort. I haven’t found a cohesive theme or story just yet but I am definitely thinking about it.

*Three of my four successful 365 projects in book form (with the 2020 edition complete but yet to be printed by Blurb)*

So many photographers are doing video these days and I’m contemplating that a little bit too. I’ve never really been into shooting video, it’s always been still images for me. However it does look nice to have a slideshow or two of your images showing on YouTube, or a little story told of your various outings and photowalks (which of course we shouldn’t do right now, but later this year, when we can do them). We’ll see…I may try some of that this year. No promises on that one though!

As for creating stories…I think I want to take a dip into my story archive and see what I can fish out of there to polish up a bit. For many years I’ve taken part in the National Novel Writing Month in November and I’ve got a lot of story fragments in document folders, both on the computer and in hard copy that I should probably do something with at some point. Right now they’re just lying there dormant, waiting to be either revived and edited or put permanently to sleep.

Another thing that I want to do this year which has nothing to do with my own creativity, but all to do with the creativity of others is to read more. For many years when I was younger I used to average a book a week, but that was quite some time ago. I am ashamed to admit that I don’t think I finished a single fiction book last year. That just won’t do! This year I want to finish at least a book a month. That small a goal shouldn’t be difficult to achieve! I’m looking at the first three books of The Expanse on my shelf that I bought some time ago and haven’t even opened. They alone should suffice till the end of March if I keep that pace! Then I can get the next books in that series at the bookstore (assuming it is safe to visit stores then).

I guess that’s quite a few resolutions (that aren’t resolutions, I should stop calling them that). How many of these I manage to do something about this year is anyone’s guess. It probably is a good idea to write them down though, so that once the year is over I can go back and see how lofty those goals were and how little I actually managed to achieve. ;-) Or, even better, however unlikely, I can say that I achieved quite a bit of what I set out to do.