As we stand with Janus, Roman god of doorways, looking both back at the past year and ahead towards the year to come, it’s customary to review what we have achieved and make plans for the future.
I like to make New Year’s resolutions. I firmly believe that you always need to strive towards something. How else can you improve yourself or reach your goals? While there are some lifestyle websites imploring people to forget about making resolutions because they set us up for inevitable failure and we’d all be much happier if we didn’t have them, I think a little failure is worth it if it helps motivate you to keep on trying again and again until you succeed.
Last year I had the goals of making writing a priority, finishing my novel and getting published. To that end, I quit my job and for a period of five months, tried to do just that. It didn’t work out quite as planned (for a variety of reasons) and, in retrospect, I would have done it a little differently, but I learned so much from the attempt. I learned that I do not enjoy freelance writing; that I cannot spend eight hours a day writing, even if it is for my own pleasure; that it’s no fun being a penniless writer; and that the real work only starts once that first draft is done.
So here are my writerly resolutions for 2018:
- Complete the free magnet story to be sent out to email subscribers
- Complete the second (and subsequent) installment(s) of my Mythical Menagerie series
- Redesign this website to be less generic and more personal to me
- Publish one short story every two months
- Blog one piece of flash fiction every month
- Finish the first draft of (one of) my novel(s)
- Increase my email subscriber list to at least 500 readers
The biggest hurdle to achieving these goals for me is to find time. I wrote last week about an experiment of getting up at 5 am every morning, but this has been utterly unsuccessful thus far! I’ll keep on trying though. Writing is important to me, and somehow I’ll make the time I need.
2017 has been a tough year in many ways, but I’m looking forward to 2018. Let’s make it the year in which all our dreams come true.
Do you make New Year’s resolutions? Do you keep them? What are some of your successes and failures of the past year, and what do you have planned for the year ahead?
