The abridged version:
- Write three times a week, every week
- except around certain vacation times
- until The Ageless is done
- Finish the first draft of The Ageless
- by June
- Let The Ageless rest
- Revise The Century
- starting in June
- Finish at least two drafts (?) of The Century
- by year’s end
- Find agents to submit The Century to in 2013
- Print some cool business cards for conventions
- Plan which conventions to attend in 2013
- Scan my entire book collection using the Goodreads app
- Become more involved in online writing / SFF discussions
I’ve never really worked on a true deadline for a story, so I think finishing The Ageless by June seems reasonable. No idea how long drafts of The Century will take me, so two is really just an arbitrary number. We’ll see how these goals evolve throughout the year!
Looking Back
2011 changed everything. It’s hard to pinpoint what motivated me to start writing like I meant it, but whatever it was, it happened in 2011.
Looking Back… by cindy47452 / Cindy Seigle | Flickr
After college, my writing meandered along. You can see from my Projects that I dabbled in a few different stories, from End Word to Natural Selection.
But in 2011, something finally sank in, and that was that thinking about writing, talking about writing, reading about writing… none of that counts. Only writing is, well, writing. You can keep thinking and hoping that one day your stories will be published and read by tons of people, but until you take real, measurable steps toward that goal, it’s just a dream.
And as any schoolteacher will tell you, we all need our dreams. But having a dream and striving to accomplish that dream are two very different things. That’s what 2011 taught me.
In the last seven weeks of 2011, I wrote over 20,000 words (you can see my 2011 daily word counts on my calendar). To put that in perspective, from the time I graduated to the time I started this blog, I wrote about 50,000 words. That was over the course of about four years, give or take a few months.
Yes, this post is a bit of self-backpatting. But I’m also putting it out there as inspiration to anyone who, like me, is an aspiring writer. You can do it—but you have to make yourself. All the good intentions in the world are useless until you get Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard.
So I’m definitely looking forward to fun times in 2012! Come join me in exploring new SFF worlds.