Happy New Year, Creative Mamas!

I hope that everyone had a fabulous holiday and New Year’s celebration. The new year is always full of promise and optimism, isn’t it?

With the turning of the calendar, we mark our second anniversary here at Studio Mothers (formerly Creative Construction). It is deeply rewarding to see how our community has strengthened and grown over time. LOVE. IT.

If you haven’t joined our new Facebook page, please do. This new page replaces our old Facebook “group,” as the page functionality is much more user-friendly. We’ll be sharing lots of tidbits to keep you inspired and motivated.

I look forward to another year of sharing our successes and challenges, drawing strength from our shared experiences to blend motherhood and creativity as happily as possible. Each year the kids get a little bit older, and it gets a little bit easier. The demands of motherhood never dissipate completely, of course — even my 19-year-old needs mothering — but as we have observed here on many occasions, caring for very young children requires a level of utter self-sacrifice constant nurturing and vigilance that is often incompatible with creating art. For those of us who are still in those trenches, the passing of each year makes a big difference.

Your stories and support have kept me going through my own periods of difficulty. It is such a comfort to know that we are all, in many ways, in the same boat. To that end, as always, if you would ever like to cross-post a related item from your personal blog, just let me know. We love cross-posts.

Lastly, has anyone made any New Year’s resolutions on the creative front? I made one of my own — a big one. I’m going to finish my novel by May 31. I realize that this feat won’t be nearly as impressive as writing a 50,000-word novel in a single month (congrats to all of our NaNoWriMo winners!), but this book is probably going be closer to 80,000 words, and I wanted to target a pace that I can maintain. I’m at 23,500 right now. I’m in that groove where I’m thinking about the book all the time, even when I’m not working on it — and it’s not hard to get my butt in the chair and actually produce because I WANT to be writing. I’m not wasting all my time thinking about how I SHOULD be writing and the procrastinating my time into nothingness. (This relief I owe in part to abandoning my goal of being “literary.” It is what it is.) I do plan to make use of the Monday Page 2010, and I hope you will as well!

I’m also getting much better about surrendering myself to the present moment, even when that moment isn’t exactly what I “want” it to be. (This is big progress for a Type-A-Control-Freak-Virgo like myself.) I’m starting to see that this peaceful current is available to me at any time, if I just remember to plug into it. Ah….that’s more like it.

How about you? What’s on deck for 2010? What will make this year the best one yet?

[Image courtesy Smithi1 under a Creative Commons license.]