It took everything we had. It took grit and gumption and the unconstrained passage of time, but we finally did it. We made it to the new year! A year of optimism, baby yoda memes, 20/20 vision jokes, and, of course, goals and resolutions. Which means it is finally time to share my 2020 writing goals, in all their wildly-optimistic glory.
My 2020 Writing Goals
- Neatly sidestep the question of whether goals are the same as resolutions by exclusively using the word goals in this and future posts
- Finish my re-write of Investigation, Mediation, Vindication, and publish it by late spring
- Allocate Thursdays for writing poetry and start sharing those poems again1
- Continue blogging every month
- Drink a lot of whisky2
- Write the sequel to See These Bones and publish it this fall3
- Reserve December for writing Fire of Unknown Origin, the final novelette (for now) set in the See These Bones universe
- Learn ASL4
- Use commas where appropriate. Also… use them where inappropriate. This is a free-comma society, man. We don’t subscribe to your limitations.
The Good and the Bad
On the one hand, these goals are much better defined than last year’s. Part of that is because I’ve actually published a book now and know (sort of) what I’m doing. And it doesn’t hurt that I’m in control of the timeline because I’ve cut traditional publishing out of the pipeline entirely.
On the other hand, even if you don’t count all the poetry and blogging, I’m committing to try to write (and publish) two books (and a novelette) in the next 11.5 months. For people who release a new book every month, that must seem like child’s play. For me, it’s going to be a stretch. But I guess that’s why they’re goals and not ‘things that will happen without me making an effort.’
The Very First Status Update
Confession time: as frequent readers know, I had most of these goals figured out well before New Year’s Day. So while my blog post itself is (fashionably) late, I’ve already been working to turn these goals into reality.
I’m ~20k words into my IMV rewrite, which leaves only 5k or so to go, followed by an edit-and-polish pass on the other ~75k words5. January and February look busy, but I’m hopeful I can wrap the book up on the writing side of things before March. We’ll commission the cover for IMV before I’m done writing6, and that would give me March and some of April to format the book and get advance copies out for review before the eventual release on Amazon and IngramSpark.
Red Right Hand, the sequel to See These Bones, is nowhere near done. At top speed, I think it will take ~4 months to complete, which means if I can start on it in April, I’ll be able to move into editing sometime in August. I’ve spent months plotting the book out in my head… now, I just need to put pen to paper. Digitally speaking.
As for my other goals, I’ve already had my first Poetry day of the year, and emerged with 4.5 poems, three of which I liked. I’ll share one of those later this month. I haven’t even started looking into learning ASL, but I did tell my wife about it, and she has a marvelous way of helping me make these things happen.
And as for whisky? Well, Christmas was very good to me, so I’ve got that covered too.
Best of luck to each of you in 2020 with achieving your own goals! Let’s make 2020 a fabulous year!
Footnotes
- This was a 2019 goal too, and I kept it… right up until the point that I didn’t. Oops.
- Way ahead of you, pal!
- November again would be ok, but October would be better!
- This has nothing to do with writing. I just think it would be cool.
- Which will hopefully go quickly, as it’s always been the better portion of the book.
- The print cover will have to wait until there’s a fixed page count, but we can start the design process earlier.
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