I love making New Year’s resolutions. Keeping them, however, is another story (ba-dum-tish!). Part of it is I don’t think year-long goals are always the way to go, that you’re setting yourself up to burn out if you try and uphold that same sense of hope and optimism you had on January 1st all the way to June 28th. I like to think of them as more like quarter-year goals. That way it doesn’t seem like such a looming task and you can take stock of things at the three month mark.
(If at times it sounds like I’ve swallowed a self-help book, I blame my parents. No, not like that! My parents teach time management for a living and have taught me well).
Anyway, first quarter resolutions:
Send out two new stories every month. This is actually something I plan to do all year. Two stories might seem like a lot, but one of them is to a market that only accepts 700-800 word stories (mystery and romance only). My plan is also to rework old stories on my hard drive, stories that I like but have never gotten to a point where I feel confident sending them out (for the purpose of this resolution here, I am considering any stories that haven’t been sent out ‘new’).
Increase my author presence. I’ll be honest: I don’t know what this actually means, but it seems important. I imagine people seeing my name and saying “Oh, that Shannon Fay, she’s so hot right now.” But how to get there? I mean, if I had lots of stories published I’d be very author present, but that’s not something I can control. My plan is to be just a little more active on social media. Hence why you are getting a blog post a mere week after the last blog post instead of in three months’ time.
Meet new people. Not a writing goal but still important. When I came to London I signed up for a ton of Meet-Up groups and only ever went to a few of them. Well, this month I am going to rectify that by going to a different meet-up group each week. Tomorrow I’m going to a gay geeks social and board game meet up. The week after that a table-top RPG group. The week after that a book club. I’m a bit nervous but also excited- I never really got into table-top gaming or took part in a flesh and blood book club (online book clubs have always been the default for me before) but this seems like a pretty-risk free way to try something new. Plus, I might get good material for a future blog post, and god knows I need all the help I can get.
Tags: Goals, Writing