October Plans 2025
Everyone is talking about “locking in” for the rest of the year.
Posts tagged ‘Goals’
Oct 5
Jul 1
The Progress of Goals for 2025 So Far…
We’re now half-way through 2025 and I thought it would be good to look at how my goals for the year are coming along. Some goals got away from me, but some I am trying my best to be consistent.
Jun 1
Writing Plans – June 2025
A new month is here, and new writing goals appear. I had great plans to finish and submit two more stories, but fate intervened. However, three days and two plumbers later, my bathroom and kitchen are okay and I am ready to focus on writing again.
I have worked on one of the stories, but it is not done. I hope to get them finished by the end of this month, but I also have the looming rewrite of my novel. I don’t want to put that off too much longer.
I suppose it is common for people to overestimate how much they can get done. In some ways, I keep overloading myself and am happy when I get something done. Other times, I feel like I need to get real with myself and set realistic goals that are achievable. Problem is, I have ambition.
I do have some balance in my life. I make time for friends and family. I do have a day job that is completely different from writing. I try to have a few hobbies that have nothing to do with writing, or writing adjacent (I’m a big TV and movie junkie.)
I have big dreams for my writing. Last year did wonders for my writing self-esteem and I want to continue the momentum. But writing is such a solitary action and I find myself talking and thinking about writing more than actually writing.
I’m sure plenty are nodding their heads too. I think this is a much more common problem. My solution? I need to find a schedule that I can stick to. Ever since I had to go back into the office, my schedule has been in shambles. It doesn’t help that the days I’m in office rotate from week to week. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful I only go in two days a week, but I need to figure it out. Maybe an hour in the evening? We’ll see. My previous schedule was a morning write and that’s much harder now to do everyday.
Maybe the best idea is to not write those two days and focus on other aspects of the writing life. Work on these posts, create more images, and work on videos for my YouTube channel.
We’ll see. I do my best and figure something out.
In other news, I’m loving Murderbot on Apple+. I watched Andor and loved it too. I’m getting back into the Handmaid’s Tale. I watched the first season, but got busy and didn’t watch anymore. Now that it had the series finale, I can binge watch it. Spoilers don’t bother me at all. I’ve watched full recaps and still watched the show. I find that recappers don’t notice everything and always leave a few things out. Sometimes they are important. Sometimes they are trivial details.
Plus, as a writer, story is rarely unique. If you’ve read the books, you kinda know how things will end. If it is original, like Andor, I’m more interested in how the story is told, not what happens. (Although, with Andor, you know it is building towards Rogue One.) A lifetime of reading has taught me a lot about how stories unfold, so when it is done well, I become a fan.
On that note, I hope everyone is enjoying some good stories.
Happy Writing!
Jan 1
2024 Writing Recap & 2025 Writing Goals
It’s 2025! Happy New Year!
But before I launch into my writing goals for the new year, I thought it would be best to have a brief overview of what I wrote and accomplished this year.
2024:
- I set a goal to publish 6 short stories this year. Four were self-published and two were traditionally published. I had been saying for years that I wanted to self-publish some of the short stories that I had written and published years ago. This goal pushed me to do so and also got me back into submission mode. By April, I had my 2 acceptances and the rest was me sitting down to do the other four. Happy to say, I did it and knocked this goal out.
- Write a finished draft of my WIP novel. Well, this I didn’t accomplish. My WIP is still not finished, but I am moving into the last third. I think if I hadn’t take the time to finish two other stories I might have made the deadline. No worries. I haven’t given up and will plow ahead in the new year with this novel.
- Wrote 13 blog posts! The total words was 7, 135. In the past, I have barely updated this blog, but this year, I had lots to talk about and I tried to put myself on a schedule.
- I finished 1 new story and rewrote 1 older story. The new story is turning out to be a longer work, but I’m happy that I finished one new project this year. Also the short story I rewrote had been neglected for too long and I had hoped to submit it at the end of the year, but I’m still not quite happy with it. (See 2025 goals for my plans.)
- I started a Youtube channel! As of this writing, I have 14 videos and 12 (?) subscribers (I got a few in the last day of the year.) I’ve had fun filming and learning the ropes. If you haven’t seen my videos, here is the video of my 2024 recap.
Goals for 2025
- The first half of the year, I want to finish a draft of my novel that I feel comfortable submitting to literary agents. Yes, I want to pursue traditional publishing for my novel. I consider myself a hybrid writer and will continue to self-pub some stuff, but for my novel, I want to try the traditional route first. So, hopefully, by the end of January, I will have finished the 1st draft and will be planning on how I’m going to rewrite. The beginning has changed since I started, so I already know where changes are needed. Six months feels like a good amount of time.
- Rewrite and submit out the 2 short stories I have in the wings. One of those stories is mentioned above (the one I rewrote at the very end of the year) and the other is a story I haven’t looked at since very early 2023. I plan to rewrite them and start subbing them this year.
- The second half of the year will be for the new work (probably a novella, maybe a novel) I finished in 2024. The story was supposed to be a long short story, but I had so much to write and ended up cutting out a lot of scenes. When I workshopped it, my fellow writers said that it felt like a longer work and I agree. So, July 1 – Dec 31 will be devoted to whatever this story wants to be. It would be hilarious if it ended up being another novel. The girl who spent that last decade or so writing short stories, now can’t stop getting novel ideas!
- Read 24 books this year. My reading has fallen off! So, 2 books a month and maybe I can whittle down my TBR pile this year.
- Commit to 2 blog posts a month. The 1st and 15th of every month will have a new post. Along with that, I am joining Substack to start a newsletter which will go out on the same day. If you already follow this blog, no worries. It will be the same posts, but if you prefer a Substack, it will be available. I will be setting it up on January 1, so over the weekend of the 4th and 5th, I will update with the link in the About page. (I have to work the 2nd and 3rd, so I may not have the time.) I’m doing this to grow my audience and there are a lot of writers on Substack, so I will try it out. For now, everything will be free. If I decide to charge in the future, there will always be a free tier. (But for now, I’m not even sure if it is right for me.)
- Commit to 2 videos a month on Youtube. I would love to be monetized this year, but I don’t have control over that. Instead, I will do my best to be consistent and post regularly. However, the fiction writing has got to come first. If I don’t write, I don’t have much content. So, writing will always be the priority.
Here’s the video version of my 2025 goals:
*Bonus Goal:
If I find myself crushing my goals, I may lose my mind and self-pub a collection of short stories. My mom mentioned a few months ago that it would be great to have a physical copy of my stories, so I got it in my head that I should do that one day. If I do this, it wouldn’t happen until the summer. The priority is the novel-in-progress. Maybe I want a palette cleanser after the novel and before I start on the other longer work. Not sure, but it is in the back of my mind. Mostly because I wouldn’t need to write any new fiction. It would be more of a formatting and organizing writing project. We will see. I’m not so sure this is a good idea, but I’m not going to completely dismiss it.
Well, that’s it. My 2024 achievements and my 2025 goals. It was a great year, and 2025 is shaping up to be an ambitious year too. If you fell short of your goals, please don’t feel like you didn’t do anything. Trust me, I’ve had those years where just making it to the end is an accomplishment. You survived 2024! Take time to celebrate that and see how you can make 2025 better.
Don’t compare your chapter one to my chapter ten. Writing is an accumulation of small steps and before you know it, you are much further along than you realize.
Here’s to a great 2025! Happy Writing.
Sep 2
Building My Garden – Beginning of September 2024
Happy Fall!
I spent the summer doing all things writing. I finally uploaded two stories that had been published years ago and one story I uploaded in my chapbook in 2015. I thought about it a long time and decided to unpublish the collection. I will be uploading most of these stories later on this year. I think it is better to offer each on its own and let the reader decide whether or not they want to read them. Each short story will be $3.49. In January, I’ll evaluate if I should change anything or continue.
I also was able to finish another new story that leans a little long. I’m warming up for the new novel and I wanted to finish this story I started last year. I knew it was going to be long beacause usually my short stories are about 1500 – 3000 words. I think this story is double (?) the words. We’ll see…
So, three stories self-published, one completed short story, and plans for at least one more self-pubbed story and one traditional story to come out this year. For the rest of the year, I’m going to push for a finished first draft of the novel.
This month marks the ten-year anniversary of my first fiction story being published. I remember being so proud of myself for finally getting something out into the world and feeling like I was a real writer. Cut to ten years later, I have published five stories traditionally and (now) three stories self-pubbed. It is not a huge amount of work, but it’s not nothing. In some ways, I’m a bit disappointed I haven’t done more. Comparison is the thief of joy and seeing other writers rack up the publication credits is tough to see. Of course I am happy for them, but seeing the slow progress of myself is, at times, depressing.
However, I have found a new mantra to help motivate me and bring me out of depression.
A few weeks ago, I was watching one of those on-line guru videos on YouTube and I read a comment that stuck with me. It read, “If you want a butterfly, don’t chase butterflies. Build a beautiful garden.” I decided that this would be my plan going forward. I wasn’t going to worry about individual publications, or what anyone else was doing in their writing. Instead, I was going to build a metaphorical garden for my writing career. Story after story. One story was not going to get me what I wanted, but a collection of stories would. I will build my garden flower by flower, plant by plant. In the end, I I hope to have a beautiful garden filled with stories that I love.
Going forward, I’m just going to link my Amazon Author page in the Published Works section of this site. Any traditionally published stories will still be listed too.
Happy writing! (And gardening!)
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