Because the holiday season is upon us, and time is limited, I've decided to start setting the goals for 2011. And since this years goals were mostly a pain in my ass and completed at the end of this year or not at all, I'm adding them to the right column so they're in my face almost every day.
There are seven weeks left of the year and I plan on unveiling the goals every Friday as I create them. This week I've come up with two. Warning, there's A LOT of thinking out loud below.
1. Achieve 50% towards remainder of 1,000,000 words of written fiction.
This is a goal I set, in September of 2008 after listening to an early episode of Writing Excuses. Basically they mentioned that the first one or two novels you write are likely crap. I know my first two were both more personal stories I'll probably never publish. They also mentioned that it takes writing one million words to begin mastering prose. These are all professionals' opinions, and who am I to argue, right? Anyways, I set the goal back then to write a million words of fiction within a certain time frame that never happened. Actually I stopped tracking it and have since written over 120,000 new words, which really surprises me considering the writer's block I went through this year.
Well, IT'S BACK for 2011 & 2012. I started a counter in the right column, but have the rest of the year's writing, so I'm not exactly sure where the total count will be for 2011 and 2012 other than an estimated 300,000 per year which is less than the 480,000 I should be able to write if I stick to a 2000 words a day for 20 days a month. WOW! That's 4-6 novels or who knows how many short stories a year, which could lead into another goal.
2. Finish editing The Courier #1 by the end of the
I've consistently not met this goal every time I've set it, so it will be interesting to see if I meet it this time. This novel is going into its 4th draft, and now on to the math. I've taken the first 100 pages of the novel to critique group and have another 200 to subject to weekly criticism, and at 10 pages a week gets me to 180 pages by the end of the first quarter. Well, that ain't guna work. So I guess I could up it to editing 20 pages a week and attend critique group twice a week. Gosh, can my ego take that much slamming...LOL? Sounds like I'm setting myself up for failure again. Sigh. Better make it the second quarter, because I also need to update the synopsis and will likely go through the whole query letter business to find a new agent. More goals...
Anyone else out there thinking about or setting goals for next year yet? What do you hope to achieve?
I'm the author of the award winning novel
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