I sometimes see in the New Year with resolutions, but like most of the of the world I’ve learned that resolutions are basically things that you’ll abandon sooner or later and will, instead, be left with crippling guilt and self-doubt for the rest of the year. So, I don’t have resolutions. But I do have some goals that I’m happy to share. And here’s a brief post about them.
Writing projects
I’ve spent much of the last two years writing short stories, with the goal of getting some published, and raising my profile a little in order to make it worth me writing and publishing the novel I started several years ago. That plan hasn’t really come to fruition, so it’s time to think of a fresh tactic. I do enjoy writing short stories, but I don’t want to write stories that aren’t getting read, and I do want to go back to writing the novel sometime this year. A change of plan is obviously required.
On the plus side, I have enough short stories in my ‘trunk’ now that I could release a couple of collections. Which is exactly what I’m going to do. I still need to work out the details, but I’m looking at three themed collections (horror; sci-fi; stories with women as the lead). Downside of this project is that it’ll require me to do a fair bit of self promotion, which I’m not very good at. But we’ll see …
Writing approach
As I’ve done for the last several years, I tracked my writing progress throughout the year (how many words written each day, and on which project). This fell away in the last month or so, partly because I wasn’t writing much fiction, but is definitely something I want to continue. This year I aim to track all my writing, including these blog posts and any other miscellaneous writing projects, so I can continue to see how much (or little) I’m writing each day/month/year.
Diary
I’m going to continue with my diary blog posts, but in an exciting new weekly format. You need only to look at December 31st’s post to see more details. If it’s been published by this time …
Kids
It wouldn’t be a good year if I didn’t have some goals for the Kinderbesten. With the Elderbeast I plan to continue much as I did last year: helping him to develop his ability to focus, to broaden his interests, and to get him to the point where he can really use the extra brainpower he has apparently been been born with. Although the Kinderbesten struggles less than his elder brother, I intend to make sure he continues on the path he’s already travelling, and doesn’t get too distracted with things like YouTube.
Work
Work is generally good. That said, one of the consequences of my personal life imploding last year was that I took a back seat professionally for several months (and was very grateful that I was able to do so). This year I plan to stand up a bit more and resist lurking in the shadows too much.
Keep looking upwards and outwards
Life can get very insular, and it’s not healthy to look inwards all the time. This one is just a reminder for me to look up from time to time, and to remember that there’s more than just my tiny life going on. My ability to take an external perspective on things, and to focus (sometimes) on the positives over the negatives, has been a critical factor in getting through last year, and I intend to continue in a similar fashion for 2018.