I haven’t been reading or hearing much about New Year’s resolutions yet, which strikes me as odd given the recession. Maybe that’s just it — everyone has already been forced to change their habits enough.

Being a writer, however, means that you always have resolutions — ephemeral, chimera-type resolutions, but resolutions nonetheless. So what are mine for 2011? Hmmm.

The obvious one is to complete the draft of Trust by a certain time — not sure what deadline to give myself there. That one, though, is the easiest to declare, if not to fulfill. Obviously I want to finish my sequel. The question is how do I fit in the rest?

I have the blog, which needs more of a commitment if I’m ever to gain any followers. I’ve been planning on getting back into freelance writing and editing. And anyone who has read any of this blog will know that there must be time for reading…I don’t feel like much of a writer if I don’t also have time to read. (Thanks, Mike, for the Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas!)

So do I make hard and fast resolutions about any of these? Don’t forget the SMART goals — I think it stands for specific, measurable, attainable, timely, umm I forget R. I could resolve to look them up. That would be SMART.

OK. Weekly blog. Freelance work by end of January. Trust draft by June. I don’t need a reading resolution — that comes naturally. Anybody else have writing or other resolutions?

Decorating, shopping, visiting family…and reading. My list doesn’t have much to do with naughty and nice — it’s more influenced by the NYT Notable Books. This year I seem to have already read most of the books on the list that spark my interest — thanks, Kindle. So now I’m catching up on the hardcovers and paperbacks that I occasionally buy from the discount section at B&N. Right now it’s Lahiri’s The Namesake (which is actually just oddly depressing so far, since that I expected more of a dark humor given the connection to Gogol). Before that was America, America by Ethan Canin, a good old-fashioned American novel, which was even more enjoyable due to the setting of western NY. After that, I still have Aleksander Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year and Sara Paretsky’s Bleeding Kansas. On the Kindle I have the rest of the new Sam Harris and the rest of Robert Reich’s Aftershock (that was even more depressing than Lahiri, but I do want to get to his suggestions for addressing the growing wage gap).

Happy Holidays to everyone and happy reading!

I’ve finally been showing some early drafts of beginning chapters of Trust, the sequel to Faith. Robert and Alicia have moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where yours truly went to graduate school. I’ve been missing C-ville quite a bit up here in the Winter Wonderland. Living in a college town is really my preferred environment: interesting people, great facilities for research and arts, well-known speakers (though Rochester has been holding its own lately in that last category, as mentioned in my earlier post).

So Bobby’s lifestyle has changed rather dramatically since PA — and some of them are familiar to me. I haven’t really sorted them out yet, which is no doubt why I chose to write about the whole idea. I wouldn’t go so far as to call that sort of thing “cathartic,” but it does open up lines of thinking that otherwise might have gone unthunk.

Soon I will be out of the “easy” parts — the parts I have imagined so many times that I’m only left with the tortuous process of actually writing them. Then I’m back to the imagining stage again.