Tell us about one thing (or more) that you promised yourself you’d accomplish by the end of the year. How would you feel once you do? What if you don’t?

It’s always been there at the back of my mind, and even in the forefront of it, that I’d publish a book by the end of this year.  I write thousands of words year after year, and yet I haven’t published anything – and year after year, I tell myself that one day I will.

Considering that it’s gotten a whole lot easier to publish books these days, it’s a wonder that I haven’t gotten around to it.  It’s either never good enough to send out, or worse, the rewrite made me scrap the whole thing.

But this year, that’s my goal – to finish something and start sending it out – to see if others think it’s good enough.  I dread the rejection letters, but I have to get around to that eventually.  After all these years on this earth, I figure my skin is thick enough anyway (maybe).

In the meantime I keep writing.

Another thing that I promised myself this year was to get fit again.  I miss my bikini body – and I don’t care if I’m turning another year older in a few days, or I’m just vain – because I suspect that I am (on both counts).  I still miss wearing my bikini, and I want to get those tan lines again.  At the very least I’d be healthier and doing what I used to enjoy doing.  So in the meantime I’m running – it’s giving my left knee hell though (pes anserinus tendinitis – there you are!), the same knee that suffered the knee sprains whenever I skied and the twisted ankles whenever I roller bladed, but I’m working my way through it.

Three times a week, I get out there and run, sometimes pushing the jogging stroller with toddler and chihuahua in tow, hearing him say, “Faster, mama! Faster!”.  I do it because I had my toddler too late in life and I want to be around when he hits his teens and beyond.  I do it because I want that bikini body and those tan lines again…and I don’t care what people say.

At least I don’t hear myself wheezing like I used to when I started up again, and each day I run a bit longer and a bit farther than the session before, allergies be damned.  The girl at the running store told me that who knows, by the year’s end, I’d run a half-marathon.  Whoa, Nelly!  I wanted to tell her.  Not yet.  Though a 5K is more doable…

After all, I do have to write that book after all…

Daily Prompt