Writing Goals For 2013
January 1st, 2013In 2011 I started posting a list of writing goals for the ensuing year, and at the end of the year I started doing an assessment of what goals I’d met, or failed to meet. Here’s my assessment of 2012, published a few days ago.
I’ve come to like this goal-setting routine. It helps me stay focused on doing the work, but diversified in the kind of work I’m doing. It also lets me realize that I really am accomplishing things, because when viewed on a day-by-day basis, progress can seem painfully slow.
In the context of these posts, a goal is defined as something I can control and complete through my own effort. This is opposed to a dream. Dreams depend on the cooperation of others, or of fate. Dreams are out of my control. I might dream of being on a bestseller list, or winning an award, or getting a movie deal, but those aren’t goals, so you won’t see anything like that listed here.
So with that understanding, here are my writing goals for 2012:
1. In March, publish my first adult science fiction novel in TEN YEARS!! Yeah. I’m excited. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this later in January.
2. Write the sequel to the novel referenced above. Bonus points: publish it before the end of the year. Can I do it? Time will tell.
3. Write and finish one additional Zeke Choy short story. Bonus points: finish two more stories.
(You’ll notice how I frame these goals so that they’re relatively easy to meet, while adding a degree of difficulty through the bonus points. This way I have a good chance to succeed, even if I don’t succeed stupendously. Clever, huh?)
4. Write and finish three other short stories.
5. Write and finish a completed draft of a third Puzzle Lands book…
(Oh boy! I hesitate to include #5 because I don’t know if I can do it, or even if it’s worth doing given the low sales this series has had, but I love these quirky books, and I’d really like to continue with them.)
And that’s enough commitment for me! I’ll check back here at the end of the year and assess how I did.
What are your goals for 2013?
Posted on: Tuesday, January 1st, 2013 at 4:00 am
Categories: Annual Writing Goals, Writing.
Tags: writing goals
January 1st, 2013 at 7:25 am
Plan? What plan??? <— That from a wonderful ".plan", probably an obscure OS, that I encountered a decade ago. You remind me that while I have NY's _resolutions_ (and they look a lot like previous years'), they're more in the line of intentions ("lose weight") than hard-line goals that can be evaluaded in exactly twelve months. Unevaluated goals…, one can't really "fail" at, and that misses the point, doesn't it. So I'll make some hard goals, remember this in 364_days:
* Drop down to ideal+10_lbs (I'm suspicious that "ideal" isn't actually so, but I can reconsider at this intermediate point) while increasing muscle mass somewhat (yeah yeah, last part is pretty vague there, self).
* Visit my parents, a 6,000+_mi round-trip to the graveside; driving will let me see so many places across the northern USA that L love (I've never visited Hawaii because I can't drive there…).
* Either jump out of an almost-perfectly-good airplane (I've been an ASEL pilot, low-time VFR, none of 'em are perfectly good), or off a more trustworthy natural object (rock climber too, most rocks or piles thereof have been in the same place for a very long time). This bucket-listing will be infeasible in ten years, the window of opportunity is closing.
* Professionally comprehend Linux sufficiently to fix it (probably an easy one, as I already do same for a proprietary unix).
Thanks for the spur, Linda.
January 1st, 2013 at 9:59 am
Hi Glen — good luck with your goals. Jumping out of airplanes or off cliffs is never going to be a goal of mine, but good luck with it. The road trip sounds like fun if you can take your time doing it. I hope you can make it happen.