Moving the Goal Posts
I’m proud to say I have (mostly) completed all of my February goals, which I set out at the beginning of the month!
February Goals:
1. Read one book about writing: Besides finishing the first Mistborn Trilogy, which I started last month, I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing a few days ago. To be fair, I haven’t finished reading it yet, but it’s a fun read and I’ll finish it up soon enough, so I’m still counting it as a win for February.
My February reads
2. Continue writing frequently: this goal was a little more undefined, but this post will mean I have written nine blog posts this month. That’s more prolific than I expected to be. And two unexpected but amazing things came out of that goal:
One of my blog posts went viral!! Since I started blogging again back in January, I’ve had somewhere between 20-40 views of my website per week. However, my entry titled “Facing Fear in Sport” was shared widely in the whitewater paddling community, and that post alone has racked up almost 1,000 views since I posted it last week. So, that’s rad!
Also, when I hit a block in my outlining process for my novel, I pushed myself to write. As a result, I wrote the first chapter of my novel! I wasn’t expecting to do that this month, and it feels so rewarding.
3. Find new resources to help me keep learning and growing: My last goal for February was also amorphous. Maybe that’s why it was easy to succeed. I have found several!
Some of them are YouTubers in the “AuthorTube” world. A few more podcasts and blogs.
Perhaps the biggest surprise here was I found a few writing conferences I wanted to attend. One of them started today. It’s called Fantasy Writer’s Week, and it’s hosted by ProWritingAid, the editing software I’ve already gushed about in a few posts. This one was free to attend (because they’re pushing their software on attendees, but I’m fine with that!). The second conference is called the Women’s Publishing Summit, hosted by Write|Publish|Sell (which I found out about because of a podcast episode I listened to). This one wasn’t free, but I got a nice early bird discount on the registration fee, plus an additional discount for attending a pre-conference webinar. That one starts on Wednesday. Lucky for me, in 2022, people have figured out how to do virtual conferences well. Since a lot of the sessions happen when I’m at work, I can watch the recordings on my own time. And breakout rooms allow for the networking you would hope to get from attending a conference in-person.
Lastly, I found a writing software called Scrivener specifically made for authors writing novels. I won’t go into too many details because I may do a follow-up blog post where I dig into the nitty-gritty about why it’s so perfect. But I did the free trial of the program and purchased it wayyy before my trial ended, because now the idea of writing a manuscript in Microsoft Word seems clunky and archaic and I can’t imagine using anything else.
2022 Goals:
Submit to at least 12 free writing contests with cash prizes: I’m happy to say I submitted to three writing contests this month. Granted, none of them were for cash prizes. One of them was a short story I had already written, and two were only one sentence long. So…I didn’t make any progress on this goal in February. Maybe if I get to the end of March and still have submitted no works that meet these exact criteria, it will be time to re-evaluate the goal. Because now the idea of my novel has me focusing in a different direction, so I’ll have to see if I can balance them both, or if I just need to prioritize what’s most important.
March Goals:
Attend writing conferences! (This one should be easy, because I’m already registered and they both kick off this week)
Write at least one blog post per week. (This should also be super manageable, because that’s less than half the number of blog posts I cranked out this month.)
Write chapters 2 and 3 of my novel. (The most daunting and most exciting of the lot.)
Make some progress toward 2022 goal above. (In reality, I just need to evaluate throughout the month if this is still a meaningful goal)
The year is 1/6 of the way over! How are your New Year’s resolutions holding up?
