Forget resolutions, let's talk accomplishments!

During a recent walk, I was listening to my favorite #kidlit podcast, Brain Burps about Books by children's author-illustrator Katie Davis. If you’re interested in children's books and like to hear directly from authors, illustrators, editors, librarians, and others in the world of children's books, it’s a "must-listen." In the episode, Katie was interviewing blogger Julie Hedlund about her adventures in writing, including a group challenge Julie recently founded called 12 X 12 in 2012. The idea is to create 12 picture book drafts, one per month and hundreds of people have signed up already. (Note: the deadline is January 29, so hurry up if you're interested in joining in.)

One part of the conversation that caught my ear was the idea of listing your accomplishments from the previous year as Julie did in this post, 2010 Anti-Resolution Revolution, instead of thinking about negative things you want to "fix." Sounds like a good idea to me! Things always go in a different direction than I had originally intended, how about you?

So what did I do in 2011 anyway? In no particular order:

• Wrote a post for I.N.K. every month (yay!)
• Finished a picture book that's coming out this spring, Seeing Symmetry.
• Enlarged some teensy cowboy boot art from the book and made it a coloring page that about 500 people have downloaded already.
  
• Designed a frog logo for my books blog…which I'm already revising (ha!)
• Sold a picture book that I'm working on now.
• Tweeted quite a bit, am up to almost 700 followers on Twitter.
• Redesigned my out-of-print sea turtle book, Tracks in the Sand, and put it on the iBookstore (free sample here).
• Bought an iPad 2, got quite a few apps, started reading ebooks mostly.
  
• Spoke about picture book apps at the Florida SCBWI conference in June.
• Scribbled down way more ideas than I could ever make happen, even if I live to be 110.
• Drew this bear:

Not to go on and on but that's the idea. For many of us, it's all too easy to focus on what we didn't do, couldn't finish, utterly failed at, while ignoring what we did get done. So take a few minutes before January is over to remember what you did in 2011…and ponder what your list of accomplishments might look like 12 months from now.


Loreen
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