Well folks, friends, acquaintances, and dragons, we have a few weeks left to the year.
How are you doing on the 2023 goals?
I wanted to finish two novels and 1 short story.
Instead, I finished one novel, one piece of flash fiction published in Postcards from Mars, accumulated 3 WNIPs (Works Not In Progress), and one bare bones of a short story not in progress, as it got derailed by the current WIP. The anthology date has come and gone, so it may never be finished.
Or I may finish it, or it may end up rolled into a Combined Ops novel. We’ll see. In the meantime, I have a bet riding on this one, so that’s probably why it jumped to the front of the queue and is insisting on being written, even though the terms of the bet are “by LibertyCon.”
I made less weightlifting progress, less weight loss, and less proficiency at shooting than I wanted to.
On the other hand, my Calmer Half and I overcame several obstacles I never saw coming when I made my plans, seized opportunities I hadn’t dreamed of, made astounding amounts of headway elsewhere, and spent time with family and friends and each other.
So in the end, it’s been a good year, even if it ends with a kraken cracking jokes in the WIP to the mild terror of the humans trapped on board with it.
Over the last few years, I’ve been experimenting with two sorts of goals: the ones I know I’ll break, and the ones I want to make. That is, in addition to the discrete milestones that are specific and measurable, like “lose 10 pounds” and “write 2 novels”, I have process goals:
1.) Write 10 minutes/day
2.) Get 10 minutes of sunlight/day
Clearly, they’re not going to happen 365 days/year. In fact, the last time focused down hard and wrote every single day for 3 months, my tendons informed me I was not 20 and could not get away with that again. And there are days without direct sunlight, and days where I’m going directly from the house to work and back, and no, I’m not counting the commute.
But in constantly coming back to hitting those process goals, I have managed to put out at least a book a year, and I’ve managed to build enough downtime into my schedule that is away from the computer and focused down on the garden, the back yard, and on sitting and enjoying the sun and the wind in the trees, that it’s been very good for my physical and mental health.
And that’s paid dividends all out of proportion to the time spent, so I’ll keep making it a priority to hit each and every day.
How are you going to modify your 2023 goals for 2024? You’ve got two weeks to come up with a plan.
P.S. Don’t forget to file your IRS quarterlies, as you’re wrapping up end-of-year tracking and starting a new set of file folders all labelled 2024.
Photo by the author, at the Whiteside Museum of Natural History.
Mad Genius Club 
20 responses to “Home Stretch”
short answer: been sick since the monday before halloween, That effed up lots of things.
Thank you! The last two months have been so utterly unproductive that I forgot that the other ten months were really good.
All right. I can allow myself to go back to bed now.
I put a mark on the calendar every day I write fiction. (It’s actually a sticker, or an ink stamp – and the color or shape tells me which WIP I was working on. But overall… There were 3 bad months there, where I got 2, 2, & 0 days writing recorded. And yet, I still got 130/351 days so far in which I have written. That’s 37%, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.
(Interestingly, at the end of the third month of drought, I specifically noted the VNV Nation concert on the calendar. The next month, 20 writing days… there is something to refilling the well, eh?)
Goals? Well, I have watched some soccer this year, but that’s about as close to a goal as I got. Oh wait, I did get the loft bed sold. Yay me.
Goals: my main ones were to track my writing tasks daily on excel spreadsheet (done), Spider Star polished and published (done), Vella project same (well, it’s published on Vella, and I shoooould have it live in book form by the end of the year. Should.). Regency fantasy mystery dropped to WNIP status, although I’m still noodling how to attack the idea from different angles. The couple of Christmas-themed fanfic ideas I had are probably not getting written before Christmas, and the one multi-chapter fanfic is flirting with WNIP status. Missed the anthology deadline on the one story idea I had, but plan to at least do dictation cleanup on that and multi-chapter fanfic before the end of the year.
Bad…
— I hit one of those dreaded decade birthdays in just a few days (me and J.C.).
— Remember LSD where the advice was “maintain, and watch the blinking lights?” I’m trying to take that attitude as short term memory sputters in a very sinister fashion, reminiscent of a failing crank-start motor car… While I still can, I marvel at the exposed intellectual structures of my physical gray matter.
Great…
— I’ve managed to maintain my massive (70 lb) weight loss for a couple of years now and have turned into a spry EverReady bunny (at least from the neck down). I celebrated by finally donating not just my old clothes, but even my extra-wide hangers to a thrift store.
So, now it’s a race. If my brain cooperates, looks like my motor will keep going and I can buckle down to get the next books done. Thankfully, unlike speaking ex-temp, I have all the time in the world while writing to get the right word down.
I have kept my head above water and done the most important things.
I’m writing — very slowly — again, although my mother’s health and living in another state does not help my concentration.
I won’t finish anything I planned for 31DEC2023.
On the other hand, a project that we thought would be simple and easy (hah hah hah hah hah hah) and turned into nearly three years of work is leading to bigger and better things! Which I may be able to formally announce by spring! Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!
I’ve been trying to finish a book since 2018 and suddenly it is done. With a cover. And a blurb. All it took was an entire change of genre, the recognition that if the heroine has had a great breakthrough then she *must not* be crying, and a push from Laura Montgomery to join writing sprints. Also I wrote my first short story.
Setting goals always scares me but I like the idea of setting a goal for sunlight. I’m also setting a goal to read a (particular) book I think I will hate. People keep asking me about it so I guess I’d better have an answer. (Right now I just say, I don’t know anything about literary fiction. ;))
*Throws confetti in honor of completed book* Congrats! It’s always a great feeling. The one I published this spring I’d been fighting with since late 2020 (so maybe two and a half years?) I can only imagine how it must feel to win a five year fight with a book!
I don’t remember what my goals were. I released a couple of books, had a story in an anthology, finished another novel that’s marinating at the moment, almost finished a novella, got the research for another book done, started a book I hadn’t planned on, and wrote a herd of blog posts. And survived three concerts and a BIG memorial service, all in 36 hours.
Oh, yeah, and have a Day Job. Life? What’s that?
Gosh I love this.
“I don’t remember what my goals were.” I just did a big bunch of stuff…
I finished a novel and got a beta reader’s opinion, but I still have to fix the opening from the problem she found.
Remember the great words from General Eisenhower: “Planning is essential. Plans are useless.” Make your plans, but don’t get too upset when reality laughs at them. Roll with it, and acknowledge the good things that happen even if they weren’t in the plan.
It’s often good to have a plan from which you will deviate.
Sometimes all you can do is try to fly the tank:
Goals in 2023:
Novel wise, I wanted to do NaNo and publish the next 4-book trilogy (yes, I know) in my Seelie Court series. Got one of the two. Or, to be more accurate, got 1.25. NaNo got done, and the novel was even completed, but I only got one of the books published. I was hoping to two as late as mid-October, but I finally accepted that it wasn’t going to happen. Still, I’ve done some work on the other three, and I still hope to get all of them out next year, preferably in consecutive months (two of them don’t have happy endings, and I don’t want to leave readers hanging very long).
Short story wise, I rocked it. My goal was to write at least 20 stories and submit to 50% of markets that were good fits. I’ve written 36 stories, and I still hope to get one more in before the end of the year. Granted, 10 of those were various types of microfiction, but that still leaves me with 26 full-length stories. As far as submissions go, “50% of good fits” turned out to be a bad measure, both because “good fits” weren’t a clearly delineated category and because there were a lot more of them than I expected; I thought only effort and courage stood between me and submitting to all of them, but it turned out the “maybe I could do that” markets were everywhere once I started looking. Still, I submitted to 37/80, giving me a nice 46%, and I still hope to get in a couple more submissions before the end of the year; I might yet make 50%!
I’m on track to release ‘Texas in the Med’, book 3 of the Republic of Texas Navy’ series by Christmas.
2023 started out strong for me, with a collection of short fiction in February, and then the e-book re-release of a novel I’d originally serialized in 2014. And then convention season really ramped up, and writing started to slide until I got an opportunity to submit a story a month to a publication that never has a slushpile or open calls for submission — and each one was to a prompt, so I couldn’t write ahead during slower times. So far I’ve managed to get every story in by the deadline, even in the super-busy month of October (I’m working on the last one right now), and I also wrote a story for an open-call anthology. In addition to writing the story for the final special submission opportunity, I’m preparing a collection of 100 short and flash fiction stories for a Make 100 Kickstarter in January — while we’re getting ready for my husband’s heart procedure.
I’m also making a list of what needs finishing, and I’m hoping that 2024 will be when I get a number of them finished and published. Empty out those file drawers of half-finished stuff and fill my “shelf” on the various online bookstores with published work
I didn’t have any goals for 2023 except to write as much as I could. I finished revising my first novel (Golden Age mystery; hopefully to come out early in 2024); rewrote the sequel and got it to beta readers; and wrote 7 more stories for my second children’s book. All while dealing with assorted not-so-minor health issues. Goals for 2024? To write as much as I can.
Got one book out, out of two planned. Unplanned was dual cataract surgeries and that impact. Got a few shorts out to folks. Still behind… sigh But got to spend time with friends and help other authors with beta reads and stuff, so I’ll call it an overall win!