A New Beginning

It’s not quite the new year, considering we are already well into February, but one can set themselves up for a new start whenever they feel like it. I don’t believe there is a necessity in waiting for the 1st of January to start a new resolution.

So here I am, trying a new journal writing format, with the option of making my journal entries public, for the sheer fun of it.

I’ve done journaling for many years on and off for the processing of my own emotions. I’ve never really regularly documented day-to-day activities unless they specifically impacted my emotional state and I felt the need to write them down. Now I am going to try and write a little more about daily events. If I can keep it going for a while, and then be able to go back and re-read them to remember what I was doing on that day, I think that would be a nice way of remembering who I was and how life changes over time.

A few years ago a wrote a book about my first year spent living in China when I moved here after graduating from university. In that book I wrote about some key events and my emotions and I’ve spent a long time trying to edit it down into a digestible piece of work that I might one day publish. I finished editing my first complete draft of the book about six months ago and hadn’t looked at it again until a couple of days ago. I’ve been dreading this part because this is the moment when I find out if I have something worthy or if I’ve spent several years working on garbage. It starts relatively tame, I can see that there isn’t anything particularly special about my writing style, there is a little comedy despite the heavy content, and there are some moments of interest. This afternoon however, I sat myself down in the quiet and fixed myself to do the required 20 minutes of reading that I’m aiming to do each day. 40 minutes later I paused my reading timer and took a breath. I think I have something, I really do think I have something worth working on and the relief is palpable. It’s early days, I’m only on page 31 of over 230, but I feel good about it and it is my goal to have finished reading it and have a second draft ready by the end of this year. I want to have sent it to some trusted people for reading and reviewing before I considering querying publishers.

So this is something I also want to document in these daily journals, some of which I can make public to share with others. I can also write about my continued life in China, happenings in my work place, or my travels. I’m going to keep working on my book, I’m going to keep writing my journal and I’m hoping to see some results in the future. Here’s to a positive new beginning, in the middle of a cold February…