As a great lover of lists, particularly To-Do ones, I love the New Year.
It’s time to look back over the past year (pretty good, all things considered), and set myself some goals for the coming 12 months.
I’ve started a list of Things To Do in 2013 over at DayZeroProject.com, including some writing goals.
Finish the first draft of The Paradise Swarm
This is my main objective for the year. As I currently only have 8,000 words done out of a planned 90,000, it’s going to be tricky and take some serious work, but I’m going to give it a go anyway. I’m hoping to write 2,000 words a week in order to finish the draft by October and be ready to start something new for NaNoWriMo.
Write 10 pieces of flash fiction
As much as I want to plough on with The Paradise Swarm, I’ve been wanting to write more short form. Ten stories of less than a thousand words (that’s one a month until NaNoWriMo) should be easy enough to manage in terms of word count, but still a good exercise.
Complete NaNoWriMo
This will be my sixth year entering, and hopefully my fifth win. I’m slowly but steadily getting better at balancing being a Municipal Liaison for a busy city and writing a first draft in a month, so I’m sure 2013 will be a great Nano.
Maintain blog and post regularly
I don’t write very fast and tend to second guess a lot of what I put down on the page as I write it. Blogging has been a great way for me to practice writing in a more fluid manner, so I definitely want to do more of that.
Also on my long list: Read 52 books (I’ve attempted it for the past couple of years and only barely managed it in 2011) and Attend writing group regularly (I’ve already started doing that, but I’m seeing the benefits so clearly I want to make sure I keep going).