2017 was a rocky year. Jeez, I feel like I say that every year now, but it’s nevertheless true again. This past year, we had some financial issues that knocked us on our asses and had me working two jobs at one point (three if you count that I also participated in NaNoWriMo). Thankfully, we’re starting to pull out of that financial tailspin a little, and we could be doing really well by early 2018 if a couple sets of promising news pay off.  All this has me feeling really optimistic for the first time in a long while. These goals were made with the hope that we continue on our current financial trajectory.

Health

2017 was a fitness journey. I started focusing on fitness around April or May. I decided that I would start running again and counting calories. Both were terrible ideas. I hate running on a molecular level, and counting calories wasn’t helping me make good choices. It was just causing me to binge on garbage food any time it was around.

After a couple months of that, I decided to switch things up a bit. I wanted a diet plan where I didn’t feel hungry all the time, where any math needed was easy to track in my head without having to be super precise, and I wanted something I could adopt easily without much disruption in the way I cook or eat.

I did some research, and decided on a low carb diet. I wanted to keep it simple, so this is what I decided on:

1. Cut out as much sugar as possible.
   • This wasn’t super difficult. I’d already replaced my sodas with diet sodas several years ago, and then replaced those with Splenda sweetened tea that I brew myself.
   • I don’t bake much, so that wasn’t much of a temptation.
   • Some things that seemed healthy didn’t fit my diet. I had to be choosier about fruits. I couldn’t really drink juice or smoothies. And breakfast cereals were basically off limits.
   • The hardest was cutting out candy, especially as the holiday seasons ramped up.
2. Stick to between 100 and 150 carbs per day.
   • Much simpler math than trying to track how many calories in a serving. These are small numbers I can add in my head, and as far as I know you don’t burn carbs when you work out.
   • As long as you’re not snacking on junk, it’s easy to keep track of your total, and you don’t have to be super precise as long as you’re making mindful choices and buying things that are lower carb anyway.
   • It’s not about total carbs, but net carbs. Take total carbs and subtract dietary fiber and sugar alcohol. Make sure, especially with bread, that you read the label. Just because it says “whole grain” or “whole wheat” or “great source of fiber” doesn’t mean it’s actually high fiber.
   • The only cereal I’ve found that was high enough in fiber to balance the carbs was Fiber One–not the kind with the flakes, the kind that looks like rabbit food. It was too bland and mushy on its own, so I bought a small bag of shredded coconut and mixed about two teaspoons in to give it more texture and flavor.
3. Don’t worry about calories
   • Meat is higher in calories, but there are virtually no carbs in it. I’m not a huge red meat eater–mostly we buy chicken or ground turkey. I wound up eating a ton of eggs and bacon for breakfast, and eating fish for lunch–usually tilapia or salmon.
   • You can eat all the veggies you want. My lunch usually consisted of an entire 12 ounce bag of steamed veggies and a fillet or two of fish. I ate a fuck ton of broccoli and cauliflower, plus carrots, green beans, and brussel sprouts. It was a low carb lunch with a ton of food and kept me full all day.
4. Cut out higher carb foods.
   • This meant no breads, no pastas, no rices, no potatoes. You might think, “Well, shit…isn’t that basically everything?” Yeah, kinda. I had to look for alternatives or substitutes wherever possible.
   • Cauliflower isn’t a miracle food, but it is a surprisingly versatile veggie. Riced cauliflower works pretty well as a rice substitute, especially in fried rice, and while mashed cauliflower can’t pretend to be mashed potatoes, with some sour cream and bacon, it’s super tasty on its own.
   • Low carb tortillas are a goddamned life saver. Tacos are low carb as long as you swap out the rice, and they can be used for tortilla chips in a pinch.
   • Spaghetti squash only takes an hour to roast in the oven, and you get a shit load of noodles. It obviously isn’t spaghetti, but it works great in traditional meat sauces, and it worked phenomenally in chicken noodle soup.

Doing all of this, I wound up losing almost 40 pounds. Weight loss wasn’t my goal, necessarily. I wanted to make healthier choices. I found myself more alert and energetic, eating less, and staying fuller for longer. The holidays–Halloween, then Thanksgiving and Christmas, torpedoed my efforts, I plan to get back on track in January. I thought it’d be hard to go back, but I’m actually looking forward to it. I find myself feeling sick after eating sweets now, so I think I’ll be way more moderate in the future.

My health goals for 2018:

• Resume my low carb diet–eating between 100-150 carbs per day.
• Get down to about 200 lbs by the end of the year–this is a weight I know is healthy for me.
• Possibly do the 100 pushups a day for 30 days challenge in February or March–paired with my diet, I think it could yield interesting results.
• I may also try going back to the gym a few times a week, depending on how my January schedule looks.

Writing

I’m actually proud of the amount of writing I’ve done the past couple years. I wrote around 75,000 words in 2016 over the course of two months–admittedly on a novel that fizzled and died due to poor planning and the election, but still. And I successfully won NaNoWriMo for the first time ever in 2017. I meant to finish that novel in December after taking a week off, but financial issues and the holidays messed all that up.

This is the third or fourth attempt at this book, and I want to finish it once and for all and move on to something else. I have 50,000 words written, and I’m guessing I’ll need about 50,000 more to finish the book. So here are my goals:

• Finish my rough draft of my current WIP novel and put it away for a good long while.
  • I don’t have a fixed schedule or a hard deadline yet. I originally wanted to finish my WIP by the end of January, but I think work may take up a lot of my time in the coming year. I’m playing it by ear, but saying by the end of  February or March for now.
  • I want to write more regularly. NaNo showed me I can write every day and get my words in, so I want to stick to a writing schedule, but not a daily one so I have time to do other things. I’m thinking maybe 2000 words 3 times a week.
• Complete 6 short stories and submit them to short story markets.
• Begin work on my next novel, which is in a completely different genre. I’m chomping at the bit to work on this one.
• Write a blog post a week. I miss blogging–this place is after all just an excuse to talk about whatever I’ve been obsessing over to give my poor wife a break.
• I’m also toying with the idea of branching out creatively and trying other things.
  • I might try to make a video game for fun–something like Dream Daddy’s interface–or maybe an RPG like Pokemon.
  • I’ve also been thinking about writing and recording some short horror radio dramas in the vein of old radio shows–organ music, sound effects, cheesy, over-the-top dialog and delivery.

I’m excited to get back to writing. Part of that stems from having won NaNo–even though I haven’t completed a novel yet, I feel like I’ve really leveled up as a writer, and I’m excited to push myself even more.

Another part stems from trying out this software called Dabble. It’s like a simplified Scrivener or yWriter. It’s app or browser based, backs up to the crowd, lets you break your book down into chapters and scenes, let you create scene cards to outline your book, and even has sections for worldbuilding and story notes for things like characters. It looks slick and seems extremely easy to use.

Reading

I’m not putting a lot of numbers or structure to these goals as they’re more general Things I’m Trying rather than hard or fast goals. That said, my goals for 2018 are:

• Read 25 books
  • Every year, I have the goal to read 25 books, and every year I fall short. I did better this year than last year–15 books this year versus nine books the year before–but quite a bit worse than the last few years. I would like to at least hit 20, but I’m keeping the goal at 25.
• Read more books by people of color and queer authors–both fiction and nonfiction.
  • I have been doing a decent job in my ongoing goal to read more books outside of my experience. Of those 15 books, 10 were by women, four were by people of color, and five were by queer authors.
  • That’s not bad, although it’s notable that Ania Ahlborn, Mur Lafferty, and Victoria Schwab each appear on the list twice, which means that six of the books were not only by white women, but the same white women. This isn’t overall bad, but I feel like I need to push myself even further and read more books by authors of color in various genres.
• Related, I’m going to actively seek out more books about gay men (and by gay men if at all possible), as I continue working through my sexuality and what it means for me.
• I would like to purchase at least a book a month this year to consume, preferably new releases if possible.
  • I follow a lot of authors, and yet I don’t read their works when they’re out, new, and actually add usefully to the author’s figures. I would like to change that.
• Read more prints books.
  • A lot of the books I’ve consumed the past few years were actually audiobooks. I’m not sure how that will shake out in 2018–I have some work stuff pending that might mean I don’t sit and listen to audio stuff as much. Even if I do, I want to get back to actually reading more–I love audiobooks, but the way I consume those is different than the way I consume a print book, or even an ebook.
• Read more non-DC/Marvel comics.
  • I love Marvel and DC, but they dominate my reading, and while there is great stuff coming out of there, there’s also a glut of great stuff coming from other publishing houses–Archie comics, Boombox, Image, Oni. And I read almost none of them. I’ve read a volume or two of Sex Criminals, a volume of Bitch Planet, Locke and Key, and Saga, but I really want to branch out and read more. I want to read more varied indie series, and I’m really interested in reading some non-DC and non-Marvel superheroes. I’ve been very interested in Faith, and I want to check out The Shield from Dark Circle.

Other

Assuming that our finances continue to improve, there are some Life Things that I want to do. Some are big things, some are small things, but all of them would be amazing.

• Contribute to Patreons.
  • I used to donate monthly to Pseudopod back when my wife and I had a decent income, and I would love to get back to that. There are several Patreons I want to contribute to that I haven’t been. I’d also love to find more things to contribute to–whether it’s buying someone’s book or donating to their kickstarter. Giving back is something I very much want to do.
• Move to a bigger place.
  • When we had to sell our house a couple years ago, it meant downsizing in a massive way. We’ve been living in a pretty small apartment for a while, and we’re getting crowded out with stuff. This year, I want to upgrade to a bigger place. There’s some townhouses nearby that look perfect and are in our price range. They’re pretty much a dream come true, assuming we can move there.
• Get a deep freeze
  • This is silly, and it depends on if we get the place we’re looking at, but I want to get a deep freeze so we can store meats or bulk items more easily without crowding out the rest of our food.
• Get a washer/dryer
  • Our washer and dryer in our apartment are crap. The high shrinks my clothes, but the low takes something like 8 hours to fully dry a load. We never had this problem with our washer and dryer we owned before we sold our house. Getting something so I don’t have to hang up most of my clothes in the shower and turn a fan on to dry them would be amazing.
• Continue working on my Spanish.
  • I started learning Spanish through DuoLingo back in September and October, but it got abandoned due to life and financial stresses. I want to get back to that and keep up my practice

Some of these goals are silly little things. Some are dependent on other things. But 2018 feels like the year to hope for silly things and then work as hard as you can to make them a reality. Some may be things I try and abandon. Maybe that’ll be the case for everything on this list. But a New Year is a fresh start to wipe away the failures of the previous year and begin again.

I hope that 2018, regardless of whether these goals get abandoned, rewritten, or accomplished, brings some much needed improvement in our lives after several years of stress and strain. And just as importantly, I hope that it brings you what you need as well.

Happy New Year to you and yours.