This is my second year participating in Julie Hedlund’s Anti-Resolution Revolution (http://www.juliehedlund.com/2017-anti-resolution-revolution/).

Julie’s approach – celebrating successes from the previous year and using them as a base to build upon – feels more hopeful and productive than writing your typical New Year’s resolutions (I failed to accomplish X this year, but next year I’ll make X happen!).

As I wrote last year, listing “successes” wasn’t my style in the past, but I think in this new-ish era of going “all in” with my writing, celebrating success, in whatever form, might be just the push I need. For those of us, especially women, who’ve been taught to be humble, not to brag, not to promote ourselves, this can seem foreign. We think people will say something like “Who does she think she is?” or “She calls those ‘successes’?” But owning that writing is vital to me and that this is where I am right now is powerful.

One of my favorite successes from this year was a critique session with Matt de la Peña at my local Oregon SCBWI conference. His feedback along with his amazing keynote helped me hone in on and articulate my “writing mission.” Articulating my personal writing mission has increased the satisfaction and joy I find in writing AND has given me one more key rubric for judging whether a piece of writing is “done.” Does it match my writing mission? If the answer is “no,” then I know I have some revising to do….