I cannot believe I’ve let this much of January get away from me without blogging. This definitely does not fit in with my goals for the year, which include a lot of things I want to do with this space. But more on that later.

My tendency is to aim high and make too many goals for the year so that when I look back and see what I’ve accomplished and it’s more than half of them, I can shrug and say, “Eh, not half-bad…literally.” The thing is, though, there are always so many things I want to do and so little time (which reminds me of the Willy Wonka quote in the video up there). I want to write fiction: short stories, the novel I started, another novel I’ve had rattling around in my brain. I want to redesign this blog and have more posts and regular features and just generally do more with Pure Bright Fire than I’m currently doing. I want my writing to be published on other sites. I want to exercise more, cook more, and eat healthier. I want to volunteer and do more with my church and donate platelets more often. I want to travel and spend more time with my friends. I want to read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies and binge-watch a lot of shows. Oh, and I also have to work and hopefully get 7-8 hours of sleep a night.

I’ve found that a lot of bloggers, rather than New Year’s Resolutions, pick a word that’s their word for the year, something they want to focus on. I can’t do that because I can’t decide on a word, funnily enough. But as I was pondering what I want to do in this new year, a certain phrase popped into my head and I can’t get it out: “Produce more, consume less.”

Now, that doesn’t quite work for all my goals–exercise doesn’t really produce anything except sweat– but it’s fitting enough that I’m keeping it as a mantra of sorts.

I want to produce more fiction, more writing for other sites, more content for this blog and produce a new design.

I want to consume less of the useless crap I read on the Internet- especially when I decide to raise my blood pressure by reading comment sections.

I want to produce more of my own food- cooking healthy things, trying new recipes.

I want to consume less sugar, junk food, and takeout.

It doesn’t work so well for exercise, like I said, and time with friends, traveling, and other fun things don’t really fall into easy produce/consume categories. And there are definitely more books, movies, and TV shows I want to consume, but I want my media consumption to lead me to produce good writing.

But it works well enough that I’m going to try to abide by it. We’ll see how I do.