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I’m writing this early because I’ll be on vacation the first week of the New Year — my first vacation in more than four years! — and I’ll be leaving on the 31st

Anyway, have you written down your goals for 2005 yet? No? Well get to it! How can you get anywhere if you don’t know where you are going?

As I mentioned in a previous posting, I have some rather ambitious goals for 2005. Here are the highlights:

• Clean out my online files.

  I have e-mail saved from years ago. Do I really need them all? And if there are messages that have information I want to keep, wouldn’t they be easier to find as text files in an organized folder?

• Digitize more of the paper in my office.

  Not only are all those articles easier to use when in text files, they are easier to find and take up a whole lot less space!

• Complete the Travel Writing correspondence course I enrolled in late last year.

  Not only do I want to finish that particular project, I want to get going using my newly learned skills. In fact, I’ll be doing research during my vacation.

• Learn Spanish.

  I’m going to visit my family in Spain later in the year and would really like to be able to have a conversation with them. I took Spanish in High School, but all I remember are the highly useful verbs “to be,” “to dance” and “to know.” Also, I can only conjugate them in the present tense. Not terribly useful in a conversation, eh?

• Complete researching and write “Your Perfect Pie.”

  I usually publish a cook booklet for every even-numbered Christmas. This year, I was just too busy. So, I bumped it up a year.

• Take a couple more writing-classes.

  I have my eye on Pam White’s food writing course and AWAI’s copywriting course. I’ve decided that I’m dedicating 2005 to my writing, both fiction and non-fiction.

• Get a short story published for money!

  I’ll probably enter a few competitions, continue searching for homes for the few short stories I’ve completed and finish at least one more — if not two or three! I’d also like to join the Horror Writers Association and continue working toward meeting the pre-requisites need to join the Science Fiction Writers Association.

• Get some non-fiction articles published for money!

  I currently have about six or seven ideas to query and plan to dig more up on my vacation.

• Read, Read and Read some more.

  I have several months of Writer’s Digest, Saveur, Cooking Light, National Geographic Travel and other magazines to catch up on. I also want to read six to 12 books on writing this year. The titles on my shelf waiting to be read include: Conceiving the Heavens: Creating the Science Fiction Novel by Melissa Scott; Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by David Gerrold; On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King; The Travel Writer’s Guide by Gordon Burgett; Bob Bly’s Guide to Freelance Writing Success: How to Make $100,000 a Year as a Freelance Writer and Have the Time of Your Life Doing It by Bob Bly and The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing, Volume II edited by Jean M. Fredette.

• Be more regular with this blog.

So, do you think I’m ambitious enough? Are you being ambitious enough in your goals for 2005? As my motto goes, aim for the stars and if you only get to the planets, you’ve done pretty darn well.

Let’s face 2005 together with hope, courage and a fierce determination to succeed in every aspect of our lives!

I’ve decided to write about my miscarriage. I’ve been taking a how to write a memoir class for the past several weeks and this story seems to be the one that most wants to be written about. I don’t know who I’ll sell the story to, but I feel a strong need to write about it and share my experience with others who may have had a similar experience but feel that they are alone in their feelings.

The truth is I hadn’t wanted to get pregnant in the first place and had taken precautions to prevent it. However, accidents do happen and condoms do spill. I got pregnant for my 31st birthday. Happy birthday to me!

I’ll always remember how I found out. It was a month later. For several months, I had been having very bad cramps with my periods — bad enough that I was going home sick once a month. This time, it felt no different, at least for the first few hours. Then the cramps got so bad a double dose of ibuprofen didn’t touch them and I was doubled over in pain. In tears, I made an appointment with my doctor.

The next day at the appointment, she asked me if I could be pregnant. I said no, but she decided to do a test any way.

Well, I was wrong. I was pregnant and it turned out that it was an at-risk pregnancy, too. There was bleeding at the implantation site. (As a side note, I also had a cyst on my ovary. That was most likely the cause of my chronic period-related pain. The pregnancy cured me of it and it hasn’t returned in over seven years.)

I called my boyfriend. I was panicked. I was frightened. And more than anything else I felt like I had let my whole family down. I had heard what they had said about my cousins who had had children before marriage. Being Catholic, that’s kind of a no-no. And here I was, a grown woman facing pregnancy out of wedlock. A part of me thought this was stupidly archaic, but the other part — the little girl — felt like I had screwed up royally.

Flash forward a few weeks. I’m in the midst of wedding plans and morning sickness (which, I might add, lasts all day long!). I got to see my little baby-to-be via ultra sound. It measured at 7-weeks and had a heartbeat. I was in love. There was a beautiful, perfect little life growing in me and I wanted to do everything I could to make things right for it.

At 12 weeks, after my honeymoon, I went in for a check up. The doctor couldn’t hear a heartbeat and sent me to the ultrasound lab. The fetus measured only 8 weeks and was quite dead. I miscarried a few days later.

Lying in the hospital bed, my body wracked with the pain of induced labor to flush out the leftover tissue, I cried because my soul hurt so much. The nurses berated me — the labor pains weren’t that bad. I just couldn’t explain what I was going through.

I had driven to the hospital alone. My husband went to work in his own vehicle. He had wanted me to have an abortion, but although I believe strongly in having that choice available, I couldn’t do that to my child, created out of love.

So here I was, a few hundred miles from my family (they lived in Northern California, I lived in Southern). I was loosing my first child and I was the only one who wanted it. My body felt sick. My heart felt sick. My soul felt sick. It was the worst, most terribly alone time in my life. This blog entry doesn’t — couldn’t possibly — do it justice. But maybe an article, or book, will.