I highly recommend you hop on over and check them out. I am going to have them tattooed onto my forearms (sort of like that guy from the movie, Memento). Tim's closing words ought to whet your appetite to check out the ten resolutions:
"I could easily list ten more, but ten is the tradition. So I'll add an eleventh in the guise of a closing paragraph. In the first chapter of his new memoir, What I Think About When I Think About Running, the great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami quotes a marathon runner as saying, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” I need to keep that in mind whenever I write.
What that means to me is that there are going to be times when writing hurts: when the words won't come, when the story seems to end in a blind alley, when your characters all turn into people so awful that you would come back from the dead just to prevent them from attending your funeral. All of that is inevitable. What's optional is internalizing that, handing it to the writing demons so they can make me doubt my idea, my characters, my talent. The trick to writing (for me, at least) is the same as the trick for running: keep going anyway. The pain may be there, but I can run (or write) through it as long as I don't turn it into suffering.
And get the next word on the page, which is all that really matters."
Tim Hallinan
www.timothyhallinan.com
I find I'm constantly reassessing what I need to focus on and work harder at, but my writing process is still evolving dramatically. What about you? Do you often set new resolutions or goals for yourself? What are some of yours?
