So at the beginning of December I had made a big deal out of how I didn’t see any reason why I should not be able to reach my writing goals for the month. Well about a week ago I learned two things: that my cat has fleas, and that I am apparently close to a Howard Hughes level of insane when it comes to fleas. I also got the worst migraine I’ve had in I don’t even know how long the other day, which knocked me out for the entire day. So while I had been pretty well on track up to that point, I’m finishing the month a few hours short of my writing goal.
Looking back on the year 2009, I feel underwhelmed by my output. Comparing this past year with the year 2008, the difference in the amount of quantifiable stuff I produced is nothing short of shocking. In 2008 I worked on several revisions of my graduate thesis, I wrote the first draft of my next novel, and I polished up and sent around to agents a children’s book. And this was all, of course, in addition to the several short stories I wrote and revised throughout the year. In 2009, though I had a lot of publication success – largely due to the amount of work I had put into short stories in 2008 – I actually accomplished very little in comparison to the year before. I finished my thesis and started sending it around to agents. I got about halfway through a new draft of that same children’s book (which had received a lot of personal rejections and encouragement from agents, but was not yet, I see now, publishable) and about halfway through a first draft of a new children’s book, which I’ve set aside for now. I got about twenty pages into a new draft of the next novel (twenty pages – hardly even worth mentioning). And I wrote and worked on revisions of a very small number of short stories and a novella for my short story collection.
I am, though, excited to start over with a new year. In spite of having had fair warning from my fellow MFA graduates, I somehow was still not prepared for the bumpy transition from MFA student/TA to adjunct English instructor, and the move from Alaska all the way to Ohio took a lot out of me, too. Now I have a firmer understanding of what real life is going to be like and what sort of time I can reasonably expect myself to spend on writing.
I’d like to write for an average of an hour a day for the year 2010. By the end of 2010, I would like to have: gotten back to work on short story writing (I’ve really been slacking in that arena), finished and polished up my short story collection, finished and polished up my children’s book, and finished at least one more complete draft of my next novel.
My goals for January:
- Spend an average of 31 hours writing
- Send out 10 submissions
- Query 5 agents
- Complete current draft of children’s book
2 comments:
Do you have a set goal for a story collection? Do you have a goal of certain number of stories or stories that you have in mind that you intend to include? Then, do you have any specific plans yet on submitting the collection to contests and the like?
I have a draft of all the stories I plan on including. There are ten, but one is a flash fiction story. It totals around 200 pages, which is short, but I've looked at various contest guidelines and decided that was a good number to shoot for. Yeah, I'm going to try to enter it in a bunch of contests. Which will cost some money but I figure it's worth a shot. In the meantime I'm sending out the ones that I think are finished and trying to get them published (two of them are already/will be published).
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