Monday, February 1, 2010

End of January 2010; February 2010 Goals

Well it’s been a very productive month for me as a writer, and I say that in spite of the fact that I fell short of my writing goal for this month. I did, however, manage to squeeze out ten submissions and five queries, although I have to admit I did every single one of those on the afternoon of January the 31st. But I figure a goal met is a goal met, whether I had put it off to the last minute or not.

As I said, I didn’t meet my time goal, and I actually didn’t finish a complete draft of my children’s book either. I consider it a productive month anyway, though, because I feel pretty confident that I pinpointed why I’ve been having so much trouble meeting my goals for the past few months and, more importantly, I figured out how to solve the problem. The problem isn’t that I can’t possibly find an hour out of every day in which to write; the problem is that the time goal had grown sort of stale for me. It just wasn’t successfully motivating me anymore.

So I’m switching goal formats starting this month. Instead of time, I’m going to make my goals in terms of projects. I’m going to continue logging the time I spend writing, but that’s just because I like to keep track of these things.

Now I didn’t finish the current draft of my children’s book last month, but I did come very close. So for the month of February, I would like to finish that draft off, and I would also like to get come solid work done on my current novel, which I’ve become increasingly excited about this past couple weeks. I don’t know why, but at the moment short stories just have not been engaging me, so for now I’m going to just accept that and let myself just work on the book length projects.

My goals for February:

  1. Finish the current draft of my children’s book
  2. Reach 50 pages in the current draft of my new novel (an addition of 31 pages)
  3. Submit to 10 journals
  4. Query 5 agents