RESOLUTION

A New Year’s Revolution?
Sign me up!
Burn it all
and start over
with an empty page.

Thoughts

I have a two wine-cooler and glass of champagne headache, but I'm hopeful about the new year. I didn't have any resolutions in the sleepy first hours of 2025, but I woke up with three of them:

• Be Creative

• Have Fun

• Share and Collaborate

Naturally, limits are required to any resolution in order to keep it realistic and achievable. So the question is, what's a good minimum baseline of fun and creativity I can commit to sharing widely on a daily basis throughout 2025?

A word. A poem. An image. Some thoughts. A bit of physical art. A story. Some combination of these? We'll have to see.

Today's word comes from the #vss365 tag on BlueSky. Probably tomorrow's as well. I'm not big into social media but I like BlueSky for not being Twitter/X, and I enjoy using daily prompts for creating poetry, a pandemic shutdown activity I stuck with long enough to develop a style I can claim as my own.

"Burn it all and start over with an empty page." If you're receiving this newsletter, you may have subscribed to it under a different name--same newsletter, different epoch. In the past, I've written about my writing projects, about the American justice system, about the application of technology to the field of publishing, but at the very start it was focused on mythology. As the poem advises, we're starting fresh.

Today's image is how a generative AI rendered the poem visually. I'm not entirely comfortable with AI, but I won't say that too loud because Siri and Alexa are always listening. When the robots do take over, maybe they'll remember me as the one who used to feed them poetry and they'll give me an extra ration bar or something. The use of AI in creativity will be a topic for us to unpack over the course of the year.

To provide a visual that's not from the mind of an LLM, the header image is a sheet of scrap paper left over from New Year's Eve. The year 2025 in a circle was meant to be cut out and taped over the year 2024 on bit of cardboard shaped like a top hat that we use each year as an annual photo prop. I didn't count how many other circles were buried under the 2024, but there are a few.

The pen I used to make the year's first hashmark bears a Sheraton Hotel logo. I think it came from a writing conference, and I'm taking that as a good omen. It was the first pen I grabbed and I didn't see the logo until after I took the picture.

I feel good about this year's resolution and better about the upcoming year because of it. Creativity is a chain reaction. Use the word, the poem, the image, the newsletter to spark your own work. I look forward to the collaboration.

More Tomorrow.