I’ve made it a tradition to list my writing goals for the coming year in a January 1st post. I used to be ambitious and list a lot of goals, but I’ve learned since to keep the list short. After all, there’s more to life than writing. 😉

Here are my goals for 2023:

1. FINISH THE CURRENT NOVEL
I talked about this in my prior post which you can read here. I’m working on the fourth volume of the Inverted Frontier series and if things go well I’ll have a final draft before year’s end. If things go really well, the novel will be done well before the end of 2023.

2. PUBLISH THE CURRENT NOVEL
Will I be able to publish book 4 this year? I don’t know. It feels like a 40/60 chance. In the past I’ve rushed two books to publication (Silver and Pacific Storm), just to get them out before the end of the year, and both did dreadfully from a sales perspective. Silver mostly recovered over time; Pacific Storm never did. So if I’m not ready to go by, say, early September, book #4 will need to wait until 2024. (Write faster, Nagata!)

3. WRITE A “RED” NOVELLA
See my prior post, where I realized that 2023 will be the tenth anniversary of the original publication of The Red: First Light in its indie edition. For years I’ve talked about writing a novella in this story world. I really need to do that. Maybe this year?

Okay. That’s three goals and that’s ambitious enough. If I can do these three things, I’ll be satisfied. But just as a reminder to myself, I’ll mention two bonus projects: (1) Start outlining the fifth and last volume of the Inverted Frontier series; and (2) Put together that third short story collection I’ve talked about over the last few years.

Happy New Year!

Posted on: Sunday, January 1st, 2023 at 5:00 am
Categories: Annual Writing Goals.