2016: Goals

If you suspect Doleful Creatures is going to appear somewhere on my list of goals for 2016, you’re right. And a regular reader of this blog.

1. Publish Doleful Creatures one way or another. Trying the traditional route first. How long will I try? Most of the year. Self-publishing is a possibility, albeit one I think I can accomplish in the last quarter of the year. Maybe I’ll be wrong on that. But it’s still high on my list of things to do.
2. Edit the Hermit of Iapetus. I have a lot of material and thought about this book I’ve been percolating on for at least two years. It’s time to get it pulled together. Hoping to make 2016 the year of Editing the Hermit, as 2015 was the year of Editing Jarrod.
3. Prep for NaNoWriMo. I’ve skipped the event for the past two years, putting more time into editing current works rather than producing new ones. Now that Doleful Creatures is close, it’s time to get back on the big-time new writing track (not that 2015 was a waste for new writing, as Doleful Creatures really took several evolutions from start to finish. It’s not the same NaNoWriMo book it was when I started).

And other things . . .

What other things?

Some are personal and private. Others too mundane to mention here. I would like to take my family to Alaska this year (or to New York/New England, that would be fun) but Alaska is what’s looming large. Michelle getting a teaching job at BYU-Idaho (similar to mine) could help us in that direction as that means more money coming into the coffers.

So I’ll focus on the writing goals.

Here are a few more:

1. Write a poem or short story a week.
2. Put together a collection of files to use with by BYU-Idaho classes.

Okay, two more. And that first one will be quite a challenge. I might bend the rules on this by allowing work on novel excerpts, for little ideas I’ve had brewing in my head. I don’t want this goal to conflict with my other writing/editing goals – but rather act as an aid or supplement, to keep the ideas flowing. Here’s where I should keep my list of goals short and attainable (2015 took me leaps and bounds into what is attainable as far as writing goes).

The second should be a bit easier: I've got a good collection of things I use occasionally in my classes. My goal is to get them filed and organized by week so when I go to look for them, there they are. And as I find new things, I know exactly where to put them.