Complete

This past Monday, crime novelist Laura Lippman asked her blog readers to name their one-word resolutions for 2008. The call was taken up with gusto, in the comments section of her blog (www.journalscape.com/LauraLippman/) and over at the email discussion list of the Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime.

I didn’t have to think about it. As soon as I saw the subject line in my Guppies email inbox, I thought, “Complete.” A natural choice for a writer, huh? Yes, but while I’d love to complete the two books I currently have underway, I was primarily thinking of something more basic.

Sometime during 2007, I noticed that my journey through life seemed to be coming full circle. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not referring to my life coming to an end. Rather, my path through life in some ways seemed to be returning to where it started. This is a good thing. Once I get back to where I was—once I complete that circle of what I now see as a detour—I can begin moving forward on my true path again.

I don’t mean to sound woo-woo here, because what I’m referring to really isn’t. The color yellow is a good example. When I was a kid, I loved yellow. My room was yellow, lots of my clothing was yellow, and when I had a choice of colors in picking or purchasing something, I would select the yellow one.

But as I reached my teen years, I began to feel self-conscious about my color preference. No one else I knew—not a single darn person—claimed yellow as their favorite. Some even downright hated it. My best friend loved red. My mom adored pink. My aunt Anne reveled in purple. Then, of course, there were all the blue people, which seemed to be the whole rest of the world.

So I stopped liking yellow. It was hard, but I forced myself. And through the years, I’ve latched on to different colors as my favorites, because you have to have one. But I never really loved any of those substitute colors. How sad for yellow. How sad for me.

Then my dental hygienist gave me a yellow toothbrush about half a year ago. My eyes lit up. I discovered that I actually loved that silly toothbrush, that I still loved yellow, and I decided, as my next appointment approached, that I would ask for another yellow one. I also realized that yellow was just one of several things I had taken a detour on. Perhaps the most important, the most basic, was how I viewed myself.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. All through my childhood and adolescence, that desire never wavered. I wanted to write novels. Short stories were OK. Poems were OK. Even magazine articles were OK. But novels? They were my passion.

In college, however, the practical side of me kicked in. I majored in journalism. I figured I could get a day job as a newspaper reporter and write my novels at night. I got that day job alright, and at first I did work on my novels at night, but that day job soon began to take up more and more of my time. Then I got married, and I moved, and I had kids, and soon my novel writing fell by the wayside. I was still a writer, but not exactly the kind I wanted to be.

Eventually, I added editing to my repertoire and I became a writer/editor. Then, as the years went by, the editing jobs began to make up the bulk of my income and I became an editor/writer. One day, finally, I was an editor, period.

Funny, but at around the same time I got that yellow toothbrush last year, I realized I had to start thinking of myself as a writer again if I wanted to be a writer. It’s strange how that works. So I started calling myself an editor/writer once more. But you know what? I don’t want to be an editor/writer. I don't even want to be a writer/editor. I want to be a writer, period.

So my one-word resolution for this year is complete. I want to complete my journey back to being a writer, period. I want to see working on my own books as primary and taking in editing projects to help pay the bills as secondary. I want to, yes, complete my books.

The yellow thing? Under control. In fact, my new noveling notebook and novel-related file folders are all yellow. I’ve also been using a pen with gold ink. That journey back I can call complete.