Happy New Years! Looking back – and ahead!

Wow, just like that, another year has gone by. Tonight 2014 rolls away, and 2015 comes in shiny and new. I\’m REALLY looking forward to this year, on all sorts of levels. Personally, my life finally feels in order and working well. Professionally, I have set some awesome goals for myself.
It\’s gonna be a great year! I\’ve got tons of stories ready to go, and a bunch more that are burning to be written.

Today though, I want to look at how I did meeting last year\’s goals, and then look at setting some fresh targets for 2015.

Looking Back at 2014

Last year I set some pretty serious writing goals. I was going to write 480,000 new words, and publish 24 titles. I wasn\’t expecting, going in, that my life would combust quite as completely as it did. The year brought a ton of changes – some of them welcome, some less so, all of them ultimately good for me, but together it meant I had a ton of distractions keeping me away from the work over most of the year.

I managed to complete about 150,000 new words – but 50,000 of those were in November, and another 20,000 were in December. So about half of it in the last two months, after I had more or less managed to get things stable again.

I did manage to release 10 titles, some under a pen name, mostly short fiction.

That I managed 150,000 words and ten releases in a year where so much was in upheaval is pretty good work, if I do say so myself.

I also met Neil Gaiman on his birthday.

I made some awesome Libre Office templates, which Holly Lisle is now using in her classes so that her students can quickly and easily make print on demand editions of their books.

I watched an online seminar from Dean Wesley Smith, and I\’m taking one of his classes.

I finished another NaNoWriMo. And I blogged every day in November.

I left a day job that I hated passionately, and found one where I am appreciated and never have burnout.

I\’ve built a wonderful, caring, compassionate relationship with my best friend and partner.

It\’s been a good year.

Looking Ahead

So 2015 will be the year of the King of the Dead serial. I have the first one already ready to go – which reminds me, if you want an advanced reader copy, we\’re pretty much at Last Call right now, so drop me an email right away! 😉

I\’ve also got a few other stories I plan to release this year.

But what about writing goals?

I looked at last year\’s productivity, and I thought: what if I just take that, and add to it? What if I use that as a basis, and then try to stretch, and grow from there? Plus I also just want to work at getting better at this writing every day thing. Writing daily is good for me, it\’s good for my writing, and I want to work hard at not skipping days too often.

So here\’s the goals:
I will write 500 words a day. I can write more than that, if I feel like it. But I will write AT LEAST 500 words a day, every day. This will be my top priority, over accomplishing anything else, over breaks, over resting. Ideally, I would like to make a 365 day streak in 2015. If I miss a day here and there, OK – but then I get right back going the next day. Writing 5000 words one day does not mean I don’t need to write the next. The minimum is a daily thing.

That’s about 20-30 minutes at the keyboard, for me. It feels like a very doable minimum, even on the 16 hour work days I have on Thursday. It also results in about 180,000 words for the year, which is a 20% increase over 2014’s completed word count.

Additionally, I will publish at least 12 new titles this year, at least one per month. Again – a 20% increase over what I accomplished in 2014.

So there’s my 2015 goal: To be 20% more productive than 2014!

What\’s your goal? I\’d love to hear what you have in mind for the year ahead!