I Believe in Resolutions

“Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go” (Lewis Carol, Alice in Wonderland).

Is this the year you actually do it?  Woah, let’s not get crazy now.

Heaven forbid you make a New Years resolution, and it actually happens.  The apocalypse might come right then.  Hell might freeze solid.

Most of the conversations I’ve had about New Years Resolutions have been sheepish, defensive and short. Someone is making resolutions, otherwise the gyms wouldn’t be full in January. But I guess they don’t want to talk about it. I get it. Will power is a fickle mistress. Put a bag of chips in front of me and I’ll prove it to you.

But I still believe in resolutions. A year is too much time to waste, and how will I truly accomplish something if I don’t even know what I want to do?

Last year was the first year I made hard, fast resolutions.  I wrote two pages of them.  I accomplished about half.

Some were miraculously successful. I made the stereotypical resolution to lose weight. I wrote down the number I wanted to see on the scale, lighter than I’d been since graduation. But I didn’t have much hope, I think. So it’s a miracle that I’ve reached December at that weight-loss goal, thanks to Trim Healthy Mama and a lot of hard work.

I prepare to lace up for the first time.

This brought a surprise with it: running. I didn’t want to run. I was sure I couldn’t do it. But when a friend I met through Trim Healthy Mama goaded me to train for a 5K in August, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was the kind of crazy I needed. I bought a pair of shoes and downloaded ‘Couch to 5K’ onto my phone.

Two months later, I ran my first 5K. I was in love. I ran three more 5Ks. November 1st, I ran 10 kilometres for the first time and now run that distance weekly. Resolution #1 for next year? Run my first half-marathon.

I also set a goal to release my first book. It was late, but We are the Living was published at the end of the summer. I’m proud of it, and I learned a lot. I’m now almost done my next novel.

Where I failed was finances. I think my goals were realistic, but I made some bad choices, and some things didn’t go the way I planned. The time wasn’t wasted, because I learned a lot and gained humility.

Will I make resolutions for 2015? You bet. I’m in the midst of thinking and praying and drafting a list. I encourage you to write a list too–if nothing else, to help you remember what you’d like to do this year.

Here are a few pointers.

1. Make the goals specific. If you don’t know your destination, how will you know when you get there?  For instance, instead of saying “I want to run farther next year,” I wrote “I want to run the Imagine Mental Health Half-Marathon”.  That gives me a place and a time. The goal is measurable.

2. Make it reasonably attainable, but not too small. In order to run a half marathon, I need to double my distance. I’ve never even run a 10K race. But, I’ve already doubled my distance once, and I have a training plan I can implement. It will be a lot of work, but if I’m healthy I can do it. It’s realistic, but I’ll need to break it down into small steps. I can’t do it all at once.

3. Make a time-limit or deadline–even if that is just ‘by December 31, 2015’. Build in some urgency.  For instance, I know that I need to double my distance by mid-September in order to attain my half-marathon goal.

4. Make it fun. I wrote a whole list of random things I wanted to do this year: go to Folklorama (a cultural festival in Winnipeg), go catfishing, go to the symphony, cook Christmas dinner for my family, learn a new skill, make a new friend and so forth.  Just a bucket list of sorts that I’d be disappointed if I forgot to do.  I learned a new skill, and I made two new friends. I didn’t go to the symphony. But there’s always next year.

I would suggest making goals in various areas of your life (i.e. finances, fitness, family and friends, faith) but not too many. 2 pages may be too much. Finally, write this all down and reread it many times during the year so you don’t forget.

Ultimately, plans change and some of the resolutions you make at the beginning of the year will be unimportant at the end.  But a year is a lot of time to waste, so why not figure out what ‘time spent well’ looks like to you, and resolve to make this a year of growth.

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine

An excerpt from my recent novel, We are the Living, a post-apocalyptic love story.  A more tender scene–at Mom’s advice 🙂

I examined his face. There was the beginning of a mask tan on his face. “Do you have to wear the mask all the time?” I asked, in a feeble attempt to redeem myself.
“No,” he said, no elaboration. He took another forkful and chewed slowly, the muscles of his jaw bunching and relaxing in slow, deliberate movements.
“I’m sorry. Perhaps not while you’re eating…”
“No, it’s fine,” he said after he swallowed, “I get along well there.”
“Yeah,” I said, half-laughed. “It looked like you’ve hit off with them.”
His lips twitched. “Heck of group of soldiers, in their own way.”
“Soldiers?”
He shrugged and laughed sheepishly. “Not really. None of them actually are—heck, they have MP5 submachine guns from the army, but about all they know about them is how to pull the trigger. It scares the hell out of me.”
“Yes it does!” A man about my age with a respirator hanging around his neck plopped down beside Liam. He fixed me with a stare that was a little wild. “After Liam teaches us, we’ll know which end to point.”
“Oh, shut up.” Liam grinned, but his eyes flicked toward me. “Even Kayla knows which end of the gun to point, and she’s probably better shot than you.”
“I don’t want to think about that, Liam.” For all my big talk, I didn’t want to think or talk about shooting. Panic, like bile, rose in my throat. I’d had dreams of the grey-eyed infected, still wearing a business suit, flying backward in a pink spray.
I felt Liam’s gaze on me again.
Max leaned in, his rubber mask clunking on the table. “Is he right?”
“Leave it, Max,” Liam said.
“You’ve shot infected?” he asked.
Liam grabbed Max and pulled him back onto the bench. “Leave it!” He turned to me. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up.” His navy eyes said he could guess what I was thinking. And then his lips twitched. “And Max is generally an idiot. Ignore him.”
I pushed away my plate. “I’ll be fine.” I’d be fine, but I wouldn’t be eating. I couldn’t expunge the image from my mind that quickly.
Liam sighed, elbowed Max, and stood up. “Walk with me?”
We slipped out of the courtyard, across the piazza, past the rusted-out Siena truck, and meandered down the road toward the east wall, all without speaking.
As we turned around at the far end of town in front of Rudy’s wheat beds, we paused and stood facing each other in the middle of the road.
“Are you sleeping any better, Kayla?” He asked.
“A little.” It seemed that my sanity had returned after joining the greenhouse crew, as if belonging brought life back to me. “You?”
He shrugged. “About the same. Listen, when Max was… yammering back there. What did you see?”
I looked up at him and gulped. It all flashed before me again. Grey eyes. Lipstick. Poof! The gun knocked me on my ass as her blood sprayed all around. I forgot to breathe.
His warm, rough hand closed around mine. “You tell me yours, I’ll tell you one of mine. No judgment, I promise.”
I swallowed. “I saw… I saw me and Simone in the back of that truck we took from the GI. We drove into the pack of infected, and I shot this one. She was in a business suit and then she just… disappeared.”
Liam flinched hard, and I could almost see the scene play out on his eyes. “I didn’t see that. I’m sorry.”
I swiped at my eyes. “Your turn.”
“I keep dreaming about Alex,” he said. “I’m driving faster and faster toward Torino and I can hear him screaming in the back of the truck.”
I was gut-punched. “He didn’t scream.”
He pressed his lips together, hard. “When we get to Torino, it isn’t him dead in the truck. It’s you.”
“Oh God.”
We stared at each other, with the full weight of our shared horror hanging between us. It drew us together slowly, and I sagged against him, my face pressed into his neck. We didn’t cry. We were past sorrow.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into his warm skin.
His hand slid up and caressed the back of my head. “Just don’t die, okay?”
“I’ll do what I can. Same to you.” I lifted my head and stared him in the face. “You take care of yourself, okay? Wear your mask, and sleep, and talk about… talk about this stuff.”
His face tightened and he sighed, “I’ll see what I can do.”
We began walking up the hill, slowly. “It bothers me that you aren’t armed here,” Liam said.
“That’s not Father Lucien’s style.”
“It’s my style,” Liam said, then quickly added, “Though I wish it wasn’t.”
“But do you need to fend off the infected any more?”
Far away a truck started up, and Liam glanced up the hill before looking me in the eye. “We’re not concerned about the infected. It’s the GI.”
The words I’d planned to say disappeared from my mouth. I blinked up at him.
He propelled me onward. The piazza was in sight. “I haven’t seen them recently. Don’t worry.”
“I wish you’d stay.”
“For my safety?”
“Yeah.”
We paused at the tailgate of the truck. Max and the other guy were already in the cab. Liam would be riding in the back, alone.
“I know I’m being stubborn about this,” Liam said quietly. “But I have my reasons, okay?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I whispered. I reached out and touched his hand, and the look in his eyes squeezed the breath out of my lungs.

We are the Living is available on Kindle and Paperback through Amazon, as well as on Kobo.  You can read further samples here.

It Never Became Light Again

Combat veteran Liam’s steely calm has not failed, but after the traumatic death of one of his friends, his facade slips and we get a glimpse of his past.  A scene from We are the Living.

I walked out to the truck and looked at the bullet hole through the tailgate, at the piled boxes, the scattered bottles, and the blood—a dark dried stain that stabbed me harder than any cry. Just like that, fury overtook me.

I slammed the tailgate down and jumped inside. One sweep of my arm, and half the boxes flew aside. A blue vodka bottle rattled across the truck bed, to my feet. There was a bloody handprint around it. I picked it up and hurled it out the back. It shattered against the building, scattering blue shards all over the packed earth. I took a bottle of water in each hand and poured it over the truck bed. Then I stripped off my shirt and began scrubbing at the stain.

The grey fabric turned burgundy and brown. I was only smearing it. I needed more water. I needed…

“Liam?”

I swung my head around. Simone, grim-faced, stared at me from the tailgate.

“Oh.” Her face sagged a moment. “Good idea. But let me get some water.”

I shoved the t-shirt across the blood again. A moment later the truck wobbled as Simone climbed up.

“Move over. I’ll pour it.” She held up a big plastic jug of water.

Mute, I crawled out of the way. She poured the water, and Alex’s blood streamed toward the tailgate. She just kept pouring, until it had all ebbed away. Then she set it down and came to hunker down by my side.

Everything she had done barely registered. My body shook, white light flashed behind my eyes.

Oh God. Oh God, no, no. Keep it together, please!

I shut my eyes tight, and the scenes that were so familiar played before my eyes like a movie—but worse, because it was not just before my eyes but around me, in my lungs, in my nostrils. One second, a laugh is burbling from my throat, next the screech of tearing metal and the boom of the explosion. The seat I’m in separates from my body and the roof parts as I pass through it. I hit the ground. I see Breanne, sprawled beside me, her eyes catch mine, her mouth parts, the light goes from her gaze. And then everything goes dark.

And it never truly became light again.

I didn’t want to, but I whimpered.

“Liam.”

This is my fault somehow. If we’d switched spots… if I hadn’t been…

“Liam.”

My eyes cleared, and I saw Simone’s heart-shaped face and bloodshot blue eyes staring up at me. She grabbed my bare arms and my confusion and anger gave way to shame, yet I forced myself to meet her eyes.

She shook me gently, “Liam, this wasn’t your fault. If anything, was it not mine?”

“What does it matter?” I looked down, past her.

“But it is what you are thinking, is it not?” And then, before I could react, she leaned in to me and her warm hands brushed up my arms to my neck. She kissed my jaw with rough, chapped lips. “Because it’s what I’m thinking too.”

I grabbed her shoulder, if only to brace myself against her. My skin could not decide if it should recoil, or tingle with warmth. A rough laugh squeaked through my lips. “I don’t know if you can call it thinking. I haven’t been so confused since…”
She reached up and touched the scar along my hairline. “Let me guess.”

I nodded.

“It’s okay,” she said softly. “I’ll cover for you.”

I stared into her eyes, trying to formulate a response. Her head bobbed closer, and my mind made itself up. I pushed her gently away.
She looked down. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t… right now.”

She laughed breathlessly and backed away. She rose up into a crouch and scrunched her face into a smile of sorts. I had a feeling it was her brave face. “Well, we’d better find you a shirt. Can’t have people getting ideas.”

I laughed half-heartedly and followed her off the tailgate. The heaviness pushed away just for a moment, and then swooped back in deeper and harder than before.

We are the Living, a zombie apocalypse/love story is now available on Amazon Kindle, as well as other E-Readers through Smashwords.  The print edition (which I’ll admit I’m super pumped about) will be available within a few days!