End of November; December 2009 Goals

Well I didn’t meet my writing goal for the month of November, although I can at least say that I didn’t fall short by much. I was actually right on schedule for the month when two key things occurred: I went on a weekend vacation to visit family and got no writing done while I was there, and then I collected about a hundred pounds worth of papers that I needed to grade right away in order to get them back to the students before finals week.

Excuses excuses. You’re right, but you know what? For once I actually don’t feel ashamed of not having met my goal. I know full well that it isn’t that I didn’t want to write, or that I was claiming I was just not “inspired,” or that I was choosing to do other things instead. In fact, I stole time here and there that I really should have been using to grade papers because I had this or that great idea and I had to get it down now. The truth is there were other things that were more urgent and I think that’s okay. It’s okay to just live your life sometimes, too.

But even so, I’m going to set that hour a day goal for December and I expect I’ll be able to meet it. Finals week is next week and once I get final grades posted I’ll have nothing to do but hang out with my husband and friends, and write. Next month there will be no excuses. There will be nothing standing in my way.

Which means my goals are. . .

1. Spend a minimum of 31 hours writing
2. Submit to 10 journals
3. Query 5 agents

End of October; November 2009 Goals

I had another bumpy month as a writer in October. I took a second job working as a sales girl at a department store last month because I thought it was the responsible, mature thing to do. The result? I made a little extra money and lost all my spare time. Not worth it. I put in my two weeks notice and my last day will be the 13th of November. Counting down the days . . . In addition to that I came down with a nasty bug a few weeks ago and I was pretty much completely out of commission for a whole week – lost my voice and everything.

Which means that not only did I not meet ANY of my goals for the month of October, but I didn’t even come close on any of them. I feel frustrated about missing my goal yet again and about the fact that I haven’t really been hitting it hard as a writer ever since I left Alaska. But I guess this is what people talk about when they talk about not having time to write.

So I’m setting the same goals as I did last month – spend an average of an hour a day writing, query five agents, and submit to ten journals – and this month I’m hoping not to have too much trouble meeting them since I’m almost done with that second job. Being so busy has given me a new appreciation for my writing time and I feel really excited and ready to get back into it.

November’s goals:

1. Minimum of 30 hours spent writing
2. Query 5 agents
3. Submit to 10 journals

End of September; October 2009 Goals

Well I’m sad to say that I didn’t meet my writing goal for the month of September. I did meet my agent and journal goals. But that writing goal, man . . . The frustrating thing is that it was an easy goal – just one hour a day. I will say, though, that I only fell short by one hour – it came down to one day. I spent the entire day Tuesday of this week planning lessons for my classes (and I mean it – the entire day! I had a lot to do!) and by the time I finished I was exhausted and couldn’t force my mind to do anything creative. And I REALLY needed to squeeze in some writing that day. Even though I almost made the goal, this is a blow because I had intentionally set a very low goal figuring there was no way I wouldn’t at least meet it, and I was sure I would in fact exceed it by a fair amount.

For once I would say it isn’t mostly a result of momentum or lack thereof. I got a pretty decent momentum going by the end of August and into early September, and though I feel my momentum beginning to wane now I know that the real reason I didn’t write as much as I would have liked is because I was stressed and overwhelmed. I was offered several jobs teaching adjunct over the past two months that I turned down because I was hoping I might get something better. The first batch because I was being considered for a full time teaching job, and then because I was being considered for a local teaching job. The “better” positions fell through in both cases, and by the time school started I only had one part time job teaching two classes a week at a school where I have to commute an hour and a half each way.

I don’t make quite enough money to feel comfortable – it is only part time – so I’ve got to find another part time job on top, which is stressful and depressing because I’m busy enough teaching these two classes and even if I wasn’t it’s frustrating to have an advanced degree and then have to just take what you can get for jobs – which in my case is going to mean working retail because my teaching schedule precludes office work. So I’ve been having a hard time of it the past month and I haven’t been writing as much as I should.

For next month I’m going to try the hour a day thing again. I still think this is a tiny goal, but I’m worried that if I set the goal too high I won’t even make an effort to reach it because I’ll feel like it’s just impossible. If I start working another job this month (which is very likely) I’ll be even busier, and probably sort of depressed as I adjust to my new non-graduate student life. I definitely miss grad school. It was so easy to find time to write and to center my life around writing. I know I’ll be able to find a way to work this out – after all, before grad school I wrote quite a lot and I remember feeling at first that as a grad student I hardly had any time to write – but for now I feel like I’m drowning in the real world. I’m starting to think again about PhD programs . . .

For October:

1. Minimum of 31 hours spent writing
2. Query 5 agents
3. Submit to 10 journals

End of August; September 2009 Goals

Well it’s been a difficult transition, getting used to a new town and hunting for a new job, but I definitely feel ready to get back into setting regular monthly writing goals for myself. I’ve really been more aware than ever lately that writing is extremely important to maintaining my sanity. As I’ve been waiting to hear back on jobs I’ve found that the only way I can take my mind off of the things in life that I can’t control is to immerse myself in some writing project or other.

In August I got some writing done – worked on some revisions of a few short stories– and I crafted a working query letter and synopsis of my novel to send out to agents. I also started putting together a list of agents that might be a fit for my novel and I submitted to my first batch of five agents. I also got another story acceptance, which makes three acceptances in the past month. That does a lot to get you motivated, let me tell you!

Even so, August certainly wasn’t the most productive month ever – after everything is tallied up I spent a little less than an average of half an hour a day actually writing, which is pretty shameful when you consider that I haven’t been working or anything. But like I always say, momentum makes a huge difference with these things, and so starting this month I’d like to start getting that momentum back up again. For September I’m going to keep my agent hunt going, sending out to another batch of five, and I’m also going to ease my way back into regular writing goals with a goal of an hour a day spent writing. I also will restart my old 1o submissions a month goal. This is more important than ever since I haven’t submitted a thing since I left Alaska and with those three recent acceptances (and all the withdrawals I had to make as a result of them) I only have a handful of submissions out right now.
So, my goals for September are:

1. Average of 30 hours spent writing
2. Query 5 agents
3. Submit to 10 journals

Starting Back Up; August 2009 Goals

Well after an even longer hiatus than planned, Damien and I are officially settled in Athens, Ohio and I’m ready to get back in the game. It’s been a fun trip but I’m glad it’s over because a month and a half is a looooooooong time to go without writing. I was working on a scholarly essay for the first half of the month of July, so you could argue that I was writing, but it felt like I wasn’t because I wasn’t able to do any creative writing on the road and as much as I enjoyed working on this scholarly essay is absolutely no substitute for working on a story or novel. The only thing really that kept me feeling like “a writer” (whatever that means) was that I did receive two acceptances while on the road – one from an Australian journal (yay! I’m soon to be international!) and one from an online journal that pays professional rates and is on Duotrope’s list of the 25 Most Challenging Fiction Markets.

This month I have one last non-creative project to work on – a book review that I’ve agreed to write for a magazine about Australian literature. It’s a fun and (I expect) easy project so my goal is to have at least a solid working draft of it done by the end of the month of August, which would open me up in September to start getting my momentum going again with my creative writing. I’ve already started doing a little creative writing since we’ve gotten here, and I’m sure I’ll continue (I had a few revision ideas for some of my stories while we were in transit and I’m anxious to get cracking on them). But since the month is already half over and I’m under deadline for the book review (and we’re still unpacking and I’m still looking for a job . . .), I’m not going to set a writing goal for this month.

What I will do, though, is set an agent hunting goal. That’s right, I’ve decided that it’s time to start looking for an agent for my thesis. I think the best option for me is to divide my hunt up into small chunks of about five queries at a time. If I send out 5 queries a month, it’ll be a slow enough moving process that if I come to see some major flaw in the novel that needs to be revised, there will still be plenty more agents I haven’t sent to yet. Five is also a small enough number that it won’t get to feel overwhelming and shouldn’t prevent me from setting and sticking to regular writing and journal submission goals. So I’m setting a goal for myself of sending out five queries by the end of the month. I plan to keep setting that same goal for future months and starting next month I’ll add to it regular writing and submission goals.

So, for August, it’s just:

1. Send out 5 queries to agents

End of June

This has been a particularly busy summer for me, in spite of not working and not being in school, and I have to admit yet again that I did not meet my writing goal for the month. I’ve been working on a scholarly essay that I hope to get published through a children’s lit journal and I have a deadline for that. This comes at the same time as packing up and cleaning the house to move, and trying to soak up our Fairbanks friends and Fairbanks itself before we leave – possibly forever. I did force myself to get my 10 submissions in, and I spent the average of a little over half an hour a day on creative writing (but all of that time was spent at the beginning of the month – the past two weeks I’ve only been working on my essay).

Considering that my essay must be in the editor’s email inbox by July 17th, and we’ll be on the road making our way through Canada and across the US during the entire month of July, I’ve made the difficult but I think only reasonable decision not to set any creative writing goals for myself for next month. This is the first time I haven’t set any goals for a month for, oh, I don’t even know how long, and it’s a strange feeling, like not really being a writer. But I don’t see any way around it. I have to focus on this essay right now – this is a great opportunity and it would be foolish to let it pass. On top of that, I’ll be visiting family that I haven’t seen in years and going on this amazing road trip . . . I think it would be a real mistake to hamper myself with self-imposed creative writing goals.

Once we get settled in Ohio in August I plan to buckle down and get that momentum back up again. I had dinner with the professor who was my thesis advisor last night and she encouraged me to start sending my thesis around to agents soon. She reminded me that you keep working on it after you get an agent and after that agent gets you a publisher. It doesn’t have to be perfect to start trying. So I’ve decided that I’m going to do one more revision after we arrive in Ohio and then I’m going to start submitting it. I have to just draw the line somewhere or else I’ll keep picking at it forever and never send it out. So a lot of great things on the horizon, and maybe it’s just as well to take a bit of a break and come at it refreshed after the move.

End of May; June 2009 Goals

I’m embarrassed to admit that, in spite of being out of school and not having to work over the summer, I did not meet my writing goal for the month of May. I do have an excuse that I think more than explains it: I was working on a scholarly essay that I hope to get published (or at least use as a good writing sample in the future). I spent so much time doing research and writing this essay that I let my creative writing fall to the side. Now I did get some writing done during May; I worked on creative writing for an average of about an hour and a half a day. But it’s a little disheartening because, looking at my logsheet for 2009, I realized that I’ve only met my writing goals for one month – January – out of the entire year so far.

On top of that I recently realized that, since I’ll be on the road for the entire month of July (in transit between Alaska and Ohio, with many lengthy stops along the way), I may not have time to get as much work done over the summer as I’d like. Even so, with the essay done (for now) I plan to plow ahead and get some serious writing done at least during the month of June. That said, I’m not sure that I want to set hourly goals for either this month or next month.

It isn’t exactly that I’m trying to give myself an excuse to push myself a little less hard – well, maybe it sort of is. Here’s the thing: I’m moving from the far north of Alaska to Ohio this summer, and leaving behind some really great friends. So I don’t want to force myself to not spend time with people because of my own self-imposed goals (not to mention the incredible amount of time and energy I’ll be spending getting packed up and ready for the move). Likewise, during the move we’re going to be stopping by and visiting family and friends in the lower 48 – many of whom I haven’t seen in years. So, even though I plan to keep at it and get some things done, I don’t feel it’s right for me to set hourly goals for the next couple of months.

So my goal for June, instead of the regular 2 hours a day, is to get some serious work done on a children’s book I’ve been writing. I’m about 50 pages into the first draft and what I would like to do is have a complete draft finished by the time we leave at the end of the month so that I can print it out and have it with me on the road to begin revising.

June’s Goals, then, are to:

1. Finish a complete draft of my current children’s book
2. Submit to 10 journals

End of April; May 2009 Goals

Well I got off track with my goals in March, and remained off track throughout the entire month of April. When I totally derailed in March it was a result of some rejections and fear of what my future holds. By April I was already starting to feel better so I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I had already lost my momentum (but certainly some of it was because I’ve been finishing up my last semester of my MFA program – to be honest I just had a lot of work to do).

Early on in April I made the decision (which might sound reminiscent of last month) that I wasn’t going to bother trying to meet my writing goal. I decided I would submit my 10 submissions – and I did – but I wasn’t going to stress myself out about writing for two hours a day when I had plenty of other stuff to do as the semester drew to a close. And even though I didn’t come anywhere near my goal (I only wrote for a bit over an hour a day) I think this was a good decision because this was my last semester and I needed it to be a good one.

But now no more excuses! By the end of the first week in May I’ll be done done done with school and I’m not working over the summer, so there will be no way to justify not meeting my goals. And I feel that I really need to get my momentum back up before we move and I have to start working again – quite possibly in the real (that is: non-academic) world. It’s going to be really hard, I’m sure, to get my momentum going in that new environment so it’s essential that I’m already going full speed when we get there.

Plus, I have a lot of projects that I’m really excited about. I started a new story the other day and I’m anxious to finish a draft of it, and then there are some stories that I had set aside a while ago that I’d like to get back to and revise. And then I’ve got a new children’s book I started working on last summer and I’d like to get a complete draft of that. So I expect to keep my goals this month.

They are:

1. Spend 62 hours on writing (average of 2 hours a day)
2. Submit to 10 journals

End of March; April 2009 Goals

I have to admit I didn’t meet my goals for the month of March. Didn’t even come close on the writing goal (about 15 hours short – 15!), although I did submit to 9 journals, so that’s almost there. And the truth is, I hit sort of a slump when I pooled together my responses from the graduate schools I applied to for next year. Ultimately, I got in to one school. One. Without being offered a TA. And as much as I try to remind myself that there are numerous factors involved, and it all comes down to personal taste, and this year it’s been highly competitive because of the economy . . . I can’t really get that feeling of failure out of my head. Can’t break the sense that this means something about my skills as writer. I only actually even applied to two creative writing programs, so if you really think about it, it was fifty-fifty as far as my skills as a fiction writer goes, but still, this rejection has really knocked me down, for some reason.

And honestly what happened was, I got my final rejection and I realized that next year I was going to have to get a job and not be a student (my husband got accepted with a TA into the poetry creative writing program at one of the schools I was rejected from so we’ll be going there), and then I just sort of gave up. I got super depressed – didn’t believe in myself anymore – and asked myself, what’s the point? I made the conscious decision I wasn’t even going to try to meet my goal. It was an actual choice – a strange feeling since my goals have always been so important for me. They help life feel more structured in this strange, obsessive compulsive way, and without them I feel lost.

But either way, I stopped writing for a few days and then when I got back to it I didn’t write much in any given day and always with the open awareness that I would not even try to meet my goal. Just didn’t feel like it, couldn’t focus. Every time I told myself I should work on this story or that another voice in my head would say, “Why bother? You’re not any good. And you’ve been doing this long enough – putting enough practice in – that you would be good by now if you were ever going to be.”

But, as you can probably imagine, just throwing in the towel made the depression even worse. For one thing, I need those goals – I have problems with anxiety and whether it’s writing or something else, I need some sort of structured, organized thing to be working on or I begin to feel like I’m drowning in the chaos. But also, not being in the middle of working out a story in my head at any given moment suddenly makes life in general just seem meaningless. I get up in the morning, do my stuff for work (which feels pointless because I’m not sure whether I’ll ever be able to teach for real), do my stuff for school (which seems pointless because school teaches me to be a better writer . . .) – it’s all just empty if I’m not writing.

So I’ve realized that I have to get back into it. If not because I want to be a better writer, then because this is all my life has ever been about – making up stories – and without it I don’t think life would be worth living. What I have to remind myself is that it’s the stories themselves, and the fun of writing and revising them, that led me into this to begin with. Whether or not I’m good enough to get into grad school, then, is irrelevant. I need to keep doing it because, if I stop, what’s the point of my life at all?

My goals for April:

1. Write for 60 hours (Average of 2 hours a day)


2. Submit to 10 places

End of February; March 2009 Goals

Well I had a rough week – I won’t get in to a list of excuses but ultimately I finished the month of February 4 hours short on my writing goal for the month. I was right on schedule until the very last week of February but several stressful things that happened back to back just sort of knocked me down and I didn’t make it. Although I did manage to get my 10 submissions in (woo-hoo for that small victory).

Now I’m a little behind where I wanted to be with my thesis and drastically behind where I should be with the novella I’m writing for workshop this semester. But I’ve decided that rather than getting all stressed out about it – which is only going to make it even harder to get back on track – I’m going to consider that having spent 52 hours this month on my writing is still more than a lot of people and all is most certainly not lost.

I still have about 50 pages of my thesis to revise – and it’s the ending that is changing the most so some of these last few chapters I’m going to have to completely rewrite from the ground up – and I need to get it done by this Friday. Why? Because my mom is coming to town (what fun!) for the first half of spring break, I have to actually hand in the ready-to-defend thesis immediately after spring break, and I don’t want it hanging over my head - the thought that the second she leaves I’ve got X number of chapters to rewrite – while my mom is here. This way I can have a nice, relaxing visit while she’s here and then after she leaves I’ll alternately work on my novella (which needs a lot of work, let me tell you) and go through smaller, sentence level edits of my thesis.

So. Keeping on keeping on in spite of February’s failure. For March I’ll be fervently working on my thesis for the first half of the month and then my novella in the second half. Hopefully I won’t have any trouble meeting my goals . . .

Which are:

1. Spend at least 62 hours on writing (an average of 2 hours a day)
2. Submit to 10 places

End of January; February 2009 Goals

I feel pretty good about this past month and I’m pleased to say that 2009 is getting off to a great start. I met all of my January goals, I wrote an average of a little over two hours a day, and I got a lot done on individual projects that I’m working on. I think this semester will be an extremely fruitful one. My thesis should be due immediately after spring break so my committee has time to read it before my defense. This means that no matter what I’ll be getting a lot done on that in the next month and I feel really good about what needs to be done – I know exactly what I want to change and smooth over and I’m starting to think (or is it wishful thinking?) that it might actually be done, ready to decide what to do with, after I defend it.

So that I have time to work on my thesis this semester I’m taking only thesis credits and one workshop class. The workshop that I’m taking is shaping up to be the best class I’ve taken in my entire MFA career. It focuses entirely on the novella and it’s taught by award winning writer David Crouse, whose writing I admire a lot and he’s a pretty cool guy, on top of that. I’ve never taken a class with David but I’ve heard from multiple sources that his classes are absolutely amazing and after starting this class I have no doubt that it’s true. We’re going to have a lot of time to workshop each others novellas and even David will be submitting a novella to be workshopped right along with us.

The novella I’m working on is part of the short story collection I’m working on, so theoretically this semester I’ll get a lot of work done on my thesis and my collection. I’m not dividing up my goals between projects because the semester should be such that I’ll have to work on both my novel and my collection and I don’t know whether they’ll need equal time, or if one will need more, or what.

I expect to have no trouble meeting my goals for February. They are:

1. Spend at least 56 hours on writing (an average of 2 hours a day)
2. Submit to 10 places

End of December and 2008; January Goals

While for me as a writer, 2008 had its ups and downs, overall I feel pretty good about all the things I got done. I got A LOT of revisions done on my thesis and while I still have plenty more to do, I no longer have any concerns that I won’t at least pass my thesis defense this spring, and that I won’t be able to make it publishable. I also got a lot of drafting done on my next novel; I revised an old children’s book and began sending it out, I began drafting a new children’s book, and I got a ton of new stories written and old stories revised. Oh yeah, and I got my first story accepted for a paying journal (cha-ching!).

Looking back on the year as a whole, I’m pretty satisfied. Looking back on the month of December, not so much. I got STRESSED in that last few weeks of the semester and while I kept writing as I finished up my school related work (as student and teacher), immediately after the semester ended I just totally crashed. Damien and I got a new Wii game that we’ve been playing the heck out of, I got some new comic books, and I started to sleep in until 9 or 10 (as opposed to the regular 5:30ish that I get up most weekdays). At the end of the semester my writing train derailed and I didn’t meet all of my goals for the month.

I did finish that draft of my thesis, and I’ve already gotten some excellent feedback on it from one of my readers, and I’m waiting on some feedback from Damien before I get back into it for the next draft. I also sent out 11 submissions. But . . . I didn’t spend as much time on stories as I had wanted to.

Now I’ve got not only a clean slate with a new month, but a new year, even, and I intend to make the most of it. I’m setting a goal for myself to spend an average of two hours a day writing this year. I also would hope to have my novel completely finished and ready to try to get published by the end of the year, as well as, ideally, the collection of short stories I’m working on. But these things take however much time they need, and so the more important goal, and the one that is actually in my control, is the two hours a day average.

For January, I’m not going to set a goal for my thesis because I don’t know when I’ll get the feedback I need and I also don’t know yet exactly what sort of goal would be appropriate, since I haven’t gotten all my feedback yet. So instead, I’m setting my usual goal of ten submissions, and I’d like to spend at least 30 hours on non-thesis writing (probably much of which will be working on my novella for the novella workshop I’m taking next semester). And in keeping with my annual goal, I’d like to spend in total at least 62 hours writing for the entire month.

So . . .

1. 30 hours working on stories


2. 10 submissions


3. 62 hours writing