Today is the First Day of the Rest of Our Lives!
It’s also the first day of a new year
Happy New Year! We did it! We survived to see another page turned on the calendar. Do people have physical calendars anymore? I’m a sucker for calendars with paintings by famous artists or portraits of my feminist icons. Of course, puppies are always a welcome sight. In recent years, I’ve had Vincent Van Gogh, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, and Beagles as calendar themes. Plus, the page-a-day Far Side calendar. That was hilarious.
The beginning of each new year is bittersweet to me. January 6th will be 19 years since my first heart transplant. (I plan a special post and subscription offer for that day.) I’m stepping into my twentieth calendar year of gifted life. So many are not as fortunate. This December, a transplant friend passed away only a few short years after receiving her gift of life. She got her first heart a year after I received my second one. I wrote about this here last month.
When your life exists only because of a gift, it’s easy to recognize every day as a gift. Most transplant organizations refer to it as the “Gift of Life,” but I prefer to think of it as the “Gift of Time.” Bonus days – gifted weeks, months, years – precious time to spend with those we love, doing things that bring us the most joy.
I have been incredibly fortunate to have been granted so much time, longer than the average amount, to enjoy this life I love. But in some ways, I feel as if I’ve squandered this time. My writing has been a lifelong passion of mine, but I’ve always neglected my writing dreams to focus my efforts on things that seemed more urgent at the moment.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve focused on growing my writing life – both online and offline. In 2025, I plan to work even harder on my writing aspirations – before time runs out. Every day, I live with a ticking clock in the back of my head, driving me to push harder, work faster. With this relentless motivation, I lay out my accomplishments and my goals.
Year In Review
The current Substack trend seems to be the Year-in-Review type posts with resolutions for the coming year. Some people are robustly setting goals, while others are announcing their intentions to step back from the grind. Either option is valid. It’s your life and only you can make your choices and bear the consequences of those decisions.
Here’s my attempt at hopping on the accomplishment bandwagon. I can give you statistics and a couple of pie charts, but don’t expect anything fancy. Sophisticated infographics are beyond my capabilities. I’ve seen some really nice images from other creators which I believe were made in Canva. I have an account on Canva, but I really haven’t tried to do anything with it. I feel like a grumpy old lady when I say that I don’t have the energy to learn new software and programs. I never got on Tik-Tok and now that appears to be doomed, so I’m glad I didn’t waste my time. I’m still trying to figure out Instagram.
2024 – My Writing Year in Review
If you have been following me for a while, you probably know that I’ve been writing for my entire life, but I haven’t attempted to publish the things I write. I accumulated both physical and digital folders stuffed with writing that never saw daylight. Think of Emily Dickinson without the talent.
A few years ago, I began attending a poetry group at the local library. This is an excellent group, organized by a professor at Wayne State University. He has published his own work and devotes one night a month to helping to coach other poets. This group has been around for decades and many members date back to the previous century, but they welcomed me into their fold and helped me to gain confidence in my writing. Midway through 2023, I began sending out a few items for publication. Five poems or essays were accepted! This bolstered me to increase my submissions for 2024, and I am happy to announce that 18 of my submissions were accepted for publication this year! It helps that I sent out over 200 submissions this year.
See the charts below for comparison:
My 2023 acceptance rate was 7%. I have no basis for comparison, so I don’t know if that is good or bad. For 2024, my acceptance rate is 8% if you divide acceptances by total submissions. However, I still have 44 submissions awaiting response. If I divide acceptances by total responses, my acceptance rate is 10.5%. Double digits baby!
One piece of advice from a member of the poetry group was to create a website where I could list all of my publications. I listened to this and created my website in the summer of 2023. You can find the list of everything I’ve published here:
2024 on Substack
One of the acceptances I received in 2023 was for an essay published that December with Open Secrets
The publication owner required me to create my own Substack account to share the essay. Between December of 2023 and May 2024, I only posted a dozen times. In May, I got serious about posting here and managed to create 75 additional posts by the end of December.
Substack By the Numbers
Total Posts: 87
Subscribers: 594
Paid Subs: 8
Followers: 1810
Those are surprisingly good numbers! Far more than I expected when I started here. I’m sure big newsletters would laugh at those figures, but I’m impressed. To be honest, I’m still not sure about the difference between subscribers and followers other than I know subscribers get emails and followers don’t.
Somehow, I have 8 paid subscribers. That’s unexpected since I really don’t paywall anything.
2025 and Beyond
One of my aspirations for 2025 is to offer some paid-only content. Since I don’t sell a service like classes on how to do XYZ, it’s difficult to find something to offer. What I do have is my writing. I plan to release a little bit of my upcoming memoir each month, just a few pages, to paid subscribers only. I’m going to experiment with a subscriber chat and maybe hosting a monthly AMA zoom session for paid subscribers. I will be open to suggestions from members of the community for other offerings.
That said, if you are thinking about upgrading to paid, DON’T DO IT! Not today, anyway. Wait for next week. I’m going to run a special promotion.
My other aspirations (I hate the term “resolution”) include querying my memoir to agents and publishers in 2025. This coming summer, I’m scheduling a block of time to work with an established poet friend who offers manuscript consultations. I hope to create a poetry book to take to publishers by the end of the year. That time clock is ticking and I need to get the ball rolling if I’m going to get my books published.
What About You
Enough about me. To paraphrase Mary Oliver, what are you going to do with your one wild and wonderful gift of time? Think of the new year as your very own page-a-day calendar. It’s a 365-page book and you get to write on every one of them. Are you going to write a romance? An adventure story? Please don’t make it a horror story. You only get one crack at each page, no going back to edit.
Maybe you can get yourself a notebook, a journal. I love notebooks! I have a stack of gorgeous, quirky notebooks and pens and bookmarks. Nothing excites me more than a fresh page, waiting for the tip of my pen to mark it permanently with my thoughts.
Take that notebook, and at the end of every day, write down what you did that day, how you felt, what was the best moment. Say something to your future self so you can look back at the year that seems to be over before it even began and you can say, “See, I lived. These were the special moments that turn the parade of days into a life.”
Tell me below, what are you going to write on your fresh pages this year?
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Happy New Year Dawn! My aspirations this year are to live a healthier life and to loosely "schedule" activities into my calendar. With that in mind, I also aspire to be easier on myself when I am feeling unwell and don't meet my schedule of activities.