Hello 2020!

I have big plans for this new year. (Don't we all?)  I'm still nailing down my goals as I don't want to set myself up for failure. I've taken a good, long look at my 2019 goals and which ones I met and which ones I didn't and why.

Some of those unmet 2019 goals have been moved farther into the future which is probably where they should have been from the start. Some of those unmet goals have been dropped completely as they were either redundant or shouldn't have been goals to start with. They should have been listed under a "To Strive For" label.

The unmet goals that should have been or could have been completed are moving to my 2020 goals list. I'm still tinkering with that list. I want to find a better way to keep myself on track/hold myself accountable than the method I used last year because obviously that didn't work so well.

One thing I have decided on is my word for the year. It is "Focused." This year I will be focused - not only on my writing, but on eating better, moving more (or at least more consistently), and not letting my email pile up. I'm great at reading/checking my email, but the items I want to save just sit in my inbox and I can't find anything I'm looking for when I need it which kind of defeats the point of saving the information to begin with.

Here's to a wonderful new beginning to all of us.

Half Year Review

It's hard to believe the first half of 2017 has come and gone already. My mom has always said that the older you get, the faster the years seem to go by. I'm starting to agree. I remember when I was in school, even while in college, the summer break was long and leisurely. Now it seems like summer barely gets here and the next thing you know, it's September already.

I spent some time this past weekend looking over the goals that I set back in January. I knew before I started that I was off track to where I thought/hoped I'd be at this time in the year. I'm about three months behind in where I planned on being. While it's a little disappointing, I'm doing much better than I did last year.

I revised a couple of goals going into the end of 2017. The first and most important one is to get the revisions for Spellbound completed, the synopsis written, and the query letter sent out to the first round of agents/editors by the second week of September.

The second goal is health related and goes into the end of the year. It is to get more regular exercise and to eat more along the lines of a Mediterranean diet. I exercise now, but it's kind of hit or miss - one or two days one week, three or four days the next, then back to one or two days the following week. I need to get more consistent with it.

How are you doing with your goals?

This I know for sure...

For most people, January is a time for looking back on the previous year and setting goals for the new year. Looking at back at 2016, I took a hard look at the steps I took to accomplish my goals.

I examined what worked and what didn’t. If I'm honest, I'm not sure if the steps I planned on taking would have worked or not because I definitely feel that last year I veered off my planned path, got so lost that I hadn't a hope in hell of accomplishing what I set out to do in those early bright, shiny days of January 2016.

Yes, I suppose I could blame having surgery and a much harder recovery than expected for a small part of not reaching a single goal that I set last year, but it sounds like a cop out even to me. I think, no, I know that I let other people take me off my goal path. They may not even have known that's what they were doing because I let their drama and moods become my drama and moods which sucked any creative spark I might have had right out of me.

This year, I'm determined not to let that happen again. Some people just aren't happy unless they're making everyone around them miserable. I know that. I'm not going to let those people take me off the path leading to goal accomplishment this year.

I've set three major goals for 2017 that I'm going to work very hard at meeting. The first is leaving people to wallow in their drama and moods on their own. The second is to have two completed books ready for submission. The third is to submit at least one of those books for publication to both agents and editors. To consider this last goal met, I have to either have sold a book or have at least 25 rejections.

Do you set yearly goals? How did you do on your 2016 goals? Better than I did, I hope.

Writing and the Holiday Season

I'm visiting The Whole Shebang website today and talking about what I learned about writing during the holiday season. Stop by and share your thoughts. Link: http://thewholeshebangsite.wordpress.com/

Goal Review

I suppose I'm a bit early with the topic of this post being that it's only the 3rd week of December but...

I bought a nice new day planner for 2014 the other day and started writing down the dates of guests I'll be hosting here and dates I'll be visiting other blogs. As I was flipping through the pages of the first couple of months, I couldn't help but reflect on what I have and what I haven't accomplished this year.

Did I meet all the goals I set for myself for 2013? No, unfortunately, I wasn't even close. This caused me to take a look at those goals. Were they too far reaching? Too much out of my control (such as hitting the best seller list - no, this wasn't one of my goals, just an example)? Did I utilize my time outside of the day job to the best advantage? The answer to all of those questions is a resounding No.

This led me to ask the question "Why?" I'm not sure I have an answer to that. Perhaps because my goals while concrete, weren't broken down into specific deadlines such I'll have X done by Y date. Perhaps while I thought my goals were reasonable, I always found myself feeling as though I was behind in one thing or another so maybe they weren't as reasonable as I thought way back in January 2013. And sometimes, life and family responsibilities came first.

As I start to think about goal setting for 2014 and what I'd like to accomplish in the coming year, these are some of things I'll be keeping in mind. Are my goals truly reasonable? Have I built in time for unplanned events/responsibilities that may crop up? Would it help me stay on track if instead of concrete final goals, to break them down a bit more with specific deadline dates?

I'd be interested in hearing about your goal setting methods and what works for you.

A New Beginning

I'm not good a keeping New Year's resolutions so I've stopped making them. I do make yearly goals though. Somehow it's easier for me to meet goals than it is to keep resolutions. I'm not sure why. Maybe, it's just that word - Resolutions.  So many people make them at the start of a new year, but so few of us ever keep them so maybe I set myself up for failure just by using that word.  At least that's what I'm telling myself.

This year I've made both writing goals and personal goals.  Right now they're just big goals. For example one of my writing goals is to keep on top of writing related email instead of letting it pile up and become unmanageable.  Right now, I have 478 unread emails in my writing email account.

I'm going to use this first month of the new year to fine tune those goals, break them down into smaller goals with deadlines quarterly, then monthly, then weekly.  By breaking them down, they'll be more manageable and easier to achieve.  One goal may be - "this week I'll clean out 25 emails, while keeping up with any new email as it comes in." It's a lot easier to know I only have to clean out 25 emails than it is to feel overwhelmed by trying to tackle the whole 478 at once.

I'm looking forward to this year with an optimism I haven't felt for a while.  Maybe it's because I'm in a better place than I have been the last 2 1/2 years. Or maybe it's because there's something about a new year. It's a fresh start, a new beginning. A time to let all the stuff that happened in the past go, or at least try to. 

Happy New Year?

January 1st is the official start of a new year but I've always viewed the first day of school in September as the beginning of a new year.  Teachers and children go back to school, routines change as after school activities start anew, and the changing of the season from summer to fall begins.  I think all those years of school and college (although I started in mid-August when I went to college) is what first made me start to view September as the beginning of a new year. 

Don't get me wrong, I celebrate New Year's Day on January 1st just like everyone else.  I even set my goals in January with various end dates throughout the year but all of those goals are met by December 31st. (I hope.)  But there's something about September that makes me want to start new and fresh.  Maybe it should be Happy New Beginnings Day although I can't imagine too many kids are happy school is going to be back in session.

Between family obligations, various doctor appointments, and a work schedule where I didn't always get out on time (which cuts into the writing time), I've been struggling to find time to write the last few weeks.  So with a new school year starting and the coming fall season, I've decided to look past all those empty calendar days where there's no notation of what I'd written on any given day and begin again.

I've set a goal beginning today of writing every day for 100 days straight.  Even if I can only manage a paragraph due to time constraints, I will attempt to write every day.  I'm hoping it will help me get back into a daily writing schedule, help me get past the point in my manuscript where I've been stuck for the last few weeks, and to help me reach my goals I set at the beginning of 2012. 

I have much I want to accomplish and it's time to get started.  Happy New Beginnings Day. 

100 Days

It is part of South Korean culture that if you do the same thing every day for 100 days, it means you have put a great deal of significance into whatever you are doing, and therefore it is believed to bring a good result.

I recently read the above in a newspaper article in my local paper and it struck a chord.  How many of us want to achieve something in particular but don’t put in the effort required to actually achieve the level of success we aspire to?  I know I’m guilty of it. 

 

There are two things I want to achieve, but for one reason or another don’t put my all into.  The first is I’d like to lose weight. (Okay, I’m a female so it’s a given that I’d want to lose weight.  What woman on the planet is happy with what she weighs?)  I don’t want to lose weight to wear a smaller size, though that would be nice, but to be healthier and to take stress off my knees.  My knees are in such bad shape, my orthopedist has told me that they are in the condition of a person twice my age.  I’ve had 4 knee surgeries in 4 years and the next one will be knee replacement.  Since I want the next surgery to years off in the future, I need to lose 25 pounds and be more active than I am.

The second thing I want to achieve is to be able to make enough money from my writing to support myself without needing a job outside the home.  While I have a novel in progress and am promoting the novel I do have on the market, I don’t write every day.  I try to do as much promoting as I can and am starting to wonder if I’m putting too much time into promotion and not enough time into writing new material.  I set a goal for myself at the beginning of 2012 to write 3 novels by December 31st.  So far I’ve written one novel and the first chapter of what I think will end up being a novella.  If I’m not writing every day or turning out a decent number of pages per day, I will not meet this goal.

So I’ve decided to do my own 100 days.  For the next 100 days, starting today, I will write every day even if I only have time to write 1 page that day and I will do some form of physical activity for at least 20 minutes per day.  I’ll be updating my progress weekly here and on my Facebook page as a way to hold myself accountable.