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