It’s a bit late, I know, but here they are: my new year’s resolutions for music and life.

1) Write more songs
This is pretty much my constant resolution – write more, write faster, write looser, write better. Last January, Darren Hayman wrote and released a song a day – a workrate I don’t think I would ever achieve without the songs being shit, and certainly not while I have a job. I toyed with the idea of releasing a cover a day, but decided against it – it’s a pale shadow of what Hayman and others have accomplished, and I would feel as if it were trying to wring undue attention for myself from work that is not my own. If I were doing it every day, I worry I’d struggle to inject much stylistic variation and I think it would start feeling like hackwork quite quickly.

Nevertheless, I want to write more. Having a slightly lower barrier to entry helps – i.e. being less critical of ideas before they’re fully formed – but just acknowledging how important writing is to me and how weird I get when I don’t do it properly and often is also key. It’s something I forget.

Summary: Songs aren’t a chore, they’re an opportunity for creativity.

2) Enjoy it more
I put a lot of pressure on myself to write more, write better. Paradoxically, I think my best and most creative stuff comes from having a certain amount of playfulness. If the writing process is fun, I generally enjoy listening to and performing the song more.

Summary: More fun please!

3) Gigs
I’m not certain whether I should be focussing on more gigs or better gigs. Probably both. If there’s going to be a crowd, if we’re getting paid, if a gig is fun, if I like the promoter, if the promoter hasn’t asked us to bring 20 people, if there are people on the bill I like, if it’s something a bit different, if it’s a gig or a venue we’ve never played before, if we feel like the promoter likes us and their crowd might – these all feel like decent reasons to play a gig. I may even get involved with organising a gig or two. Ooooooh.

Summary: Not more, not better, but nice gigs.

4) Tweet a bit less
I feel like 2011 was the year I hit my twitter stride and really started enjoying it – using it for conversations, jokes and a medium for a form of surreal stream-of-consciousness storytelling that I find highly enjoyable, especially when other people join in (to wit: an alternative version of Sex and the City that even I might watch) . However, these experiments take up a lot of tweets, and I get annoyed with others who fill up my timeline with volume, whether or not their quality is good. Don’t expect my stream to be less self-indulgent or discursive – far from it, I think there’s a lot to be done with Twitter that I haven’t figured out yet – but maybe I could moderate my rate a bit?

Summary: Twitter friends don’t let other Twitter friends alienate their followers with large quantities of stream-of-consciousness tweets.

5) Make Pastry
I learned shortcrust in 2011, and have already done puff from scratch in 2012. Filo is NEVER going to happen, so let’s cross this one off, eh?

Summary: SUCCESS!

6) Eat less pastry

I am a little bit tubby after Xmas, still. Time to stop shoving pie at my face.

This will require feeding all the pastry I plan to make to people I like. You’re welcome.

Summary: make friends with pastry then give them pastry

7) More photography
I’ve fallen out of photography in the last few years, and getting an entry-level DSLR and (unrelatedly) an instagram account may be my way back into it. I really like how science blogger Alice Bell uses photography and commentary to make London look way existential* – how photographic composition forms an observation (figurative as well as literal). Obviously the use of photos has been widespread on twitter and flickr as a social tool, a discussion-starter – and I find the creation of a world (environmental storytelling, if you will) by judicious use of image very interesting – patching together fragments and inferring the inbetween. Let’s see what happens.

Summary: Photography is way existential

8 ) More drawing
I’m a terrible draftsman; I got barely a passing grade at GCSE art. But I’ve used pen drawing a lot to start to sketch out the conceptual heart of a song, its shape before I have words to describe it. Its inky birth moan.

Summary: Draw your own album cover(s).

9) Film-making
Not sure about this yet, but I feel that I want more to fit around a song – give it its pipe and armchair and comfy slippers. I don’t know whether this is image or costume or dance or film yet.

Summary: More art, more story.

10) More blog
Or rather less blog, more frequent. Something between the essays I write on this site not often enough and the fishfood I sprinkle on my twitter feed rather too often. Works in progress, ideas, comments, images, rather than just… essays.

Summary: Less is more.

That’s all the news. Add your suggestions below the line.

*this is less a resolution than a comment: 2012 will not only be the year that “way existential” becomes my default compliment, but also the year it fully transitions from being an ironic Clueless quotation to me really meaning it and forgetting where I got it from. Current status: only 42% Cher.