2012 progress report

Sat in the lounge at Hong Kong airport, waiting for a plane to take me away to London, it's time to reflect on the month so far. I'm only 24 days into the year so it feels a little premature to think about resolutions, but it's good to take the opportunity when it's available.

Measure and modify: writing this now is part of this goal. I'll identify here some concrete goals for the next month.

Comedy: definitely slacked off here. I haven't performed since the 16th of December; my travel schedule has kept me far from anything funny so far this year, but I haven't been writing a new set for when I'm in Singapore. On the one hand, it's going to be easier to work up material for Singapore when I'm in Singapore, but that's no excuse for not practicing. For the next month, I should try to write or rehearse a bit every day.

Keep writing. Here's something I can feel proud of: in the first 24 days of January, I've written and had published 111 reviews on Tripadvisor. (There are a few extra in the 'pending' list but I work off the total published, as that's the easiest to verify and compare against others.) I'm not sure if I can maintain this pace for the rest of the year (that would imply around 1,600 reviews for the year) but to put that in some sort of perspective, in the previous four years I'd written about 56 reviews. It's shocking how productive I can be if I want to.

However, all those reviews aren't contributing to me redrafting my novel; I need to spend some more time on that. I wonder whether it's time to recruit a reader to get some constructive feedback yet.

Finish things. Diet Croydon is now available for sale on Amazon's Kindle store, and I'm happy with that, even though it felt like something I should have done some time ago. I feel a logical consequence is that I should write another book, on publishing books on the Kindle platform, and price that cheaply. Then perhaps people will buy that, and then buy Diet Croydon too, although it will be a bit of a strange cross-fertilisation. I haven't done anything on the rabbit film, except to discover that I don't have the right software to edit it, which is a bit of an obstacle. Next goal there, then, is to get some video editting software, learn to use it, and stick things together in a satisfactory manner.

I haven't read quite as many of the books as I set out to - I hit a block with the Great Irish Kitten Killing Novel whilst in Seattle, but it shouldn't be too hard to catch up on these once we're back from London. (We made a conscious decision not to travel back to London loaded down with too many books, so this pause is acceptable.)

Keep fit. Oh dear. Again, I can blame travel for this, but I've run for maybe 45 minutes so far this year, and my slowly increasing weight is testament to this. Something to fix in London and beyond.

Keep in contact. Well, throwing a big party in London for all my friends and family should count for something, although it has already illustrated to me that Facebook is an unreliable conduit for inviting people to events. I suppose since most people's feeds are so clogged with ephemera, it's hard to stand out and get attention sometimes.

Learn to dance, learn a foreign language, count my blessings. Er... Failing on all three of these. It's my hope that with my wife in the same country as me for the next month that we can work together on the first. For the second, I'm concerned about finding the time; for the third, I need to get up a bit earlier, pause, look around, and then get going again. What could be easier, right?