A January mentality is still pervading my days.  A new year—out with the old; in with the new.  I’m making room in  drawers and closets, gathering bags of clothes from all family members to pass along.  I’m also attempting, again, to clean out exhausting mental patterns, like “I’m in charge of making everything run absolutely perfectly in my family’s world.”  I’ve got a new exercise routine, expanded to include a face work-out; why not take this “out with the old” idea to the best possible extremes?  For the first time in years, I even went out and bought a new supply of “trouser” socks/stockings in various shades so that on the rare occasions I dress up, I’m not pawing and tossing through to find the best of the worst stretched out ones, twisting the runs to go under my heels, and discovering I need more than two heels.  

        Where did I find the time to do this literal and proverbial house cleaning?  I’ve also discarded my old writing routine, and I have yet to adopt a new one.         

        I’ve [almost] never met a type of writing I didn’t like.  Technical writing is not for me, but I have tried nearly everything else – news, travel, design, lifestyle, profiles, memoir, book reviews, restaurant reviews, essays serious and humorous, brochures, ads, annual reports, newsletters, greeting cards, radio spots, film scripts, nonfiction books,  fiction—and been published and paid for writing them all, with probably a few I’ve left out.  But reduced as my weekly writing hours are (and will remain while I have a child at home), I often feel like a harried traveler attempting to catch trains to multiple destinations at the same time.  I’ve decided, no more.  Time to choose one, (or maybe two or three?) types of writing to pursue for now.  But how to choose?  How does any writer choose one project or germ of an idea to develop, and then let every other idea go, or at least go for the moment?  I’m still a wide-eyed kid in a candy shop finding it really hard to choose a single flavor…