2016 Goal Report

At the beginning of every year, I make goals for myself, and I try and share them here so that someone keeps me honest. This year, however, I found a writing partner, and I shared my goals with her. She was the one who kept me going, and I found that I was very successful… mostly.

This year, instead of general goals, I planned out each month. I had long-term goals, and I had monthly short-term goals to keep me on track.

Long term goals: Write more, focus on publishing.

I feel like I’ve hit each one of those. It’s hard to really quantify, but at the beginning of the year, I had a first draft of Commissioned, and a first draft of Hooked. Commissioned went through three very vigorous revisions, went through multiple beta readers, and is now being queried. Hooked has more of a direction, though now that I’ve written book 3 and 4, there will be some obvious changes that I’ll need to address, but that should be easy enough.

Write more. I had the idea of getting Commissioned ready for querying, and hopefully finishing the trilogy. As I expanded, the series turned into four books, and I had an idea for another book as well, a light, science-fiction version of Jack and the Beanstalk. So instead of writing one brand new book in 2016, I ended up writing three.

My other goal was to read 45 books this year. Unfortunately, I did not reach that goal, but if I could count the different novels that I beta read for, I would be pretty darn close. About four books off, and the month isn’t quite over.

How about the rest of you? Did you reach your goals?