Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the final blog post of the year. This is the post where I recap all the things I thought I would have accomplished by now and see how woefully short I fell. If you want to, you can reference 2021 Goals before starting the rest of this post.
Actually though, I just went through my Q4 and the year plan didn’t fall half as far off the rails as I’d originally thought it had. Next year I will be doing a 6 month goal refresher because it has become obvious that looking back at the goals only once after setting the goals isn’t really enough. I set the goals and vaguely know what they are when the year starts, but come mid-year, they get muddled like the plots of some novels I’ve read, and then suddenly I’m no longer working toward the same goals I was when I started the year.
Writing
The main goal I wanted to focus on this year was in writing, and the main project I wanted to focus on is a trilogy of vampire novels, temporarily called Written in Blood after the second book in the series. I was close (within 4 scenes) to having a first draft after many failed zero draft attempts, but I wanted to have a first draft finished before turning it from a standalone into the second book in a trilogy. Mission Accomplished.
Then, I wanted to turn around and not only outline the entire three book series, but do a more detailed outline of the first book. Also complete.
Starting in Q2, I wanted to finish a draft of the first book. I actually state in my goals post, “it should just be a matter of getting the words down.” That is normally true, but the words were slow to come, clunky, and I found writing in 1st person for the first time very difficult to write.
Beyond Q2 I didn’t want to get too far ahead in my planning because I knew that my year would be dependent on how well my previous quarters went and if I was ahead or behind schedule. The idea was to rewrite what was now going to be book 2, and to polish books 1 and 2 all quarter. Then, I could go into Q4 and PrepTober ready to work on book 3 and finish out the trilogy in November, polishing all the novels starting in January of 2022 and querying them when they were ready together with my other novel.
In Q3 most of the plan for writing for the rest of the year got thrown out the window when I went to conference and had some important revelations about big picture things that my vampire novels, unfortunately, were a larger part of.
Other Goals
I also had other goals such as querying Utopian Melody. I did that up until conference when I had the new revelations, and now this book too will need rewrites.
I mention wanting to outline several other book ideas that I had, but looking back, I don’t know which ones they were. I think I had an idea that I would take one likely book idea per month and just take a few days and outline it, see if I even liked the idea and could make a whole book out of it, or if it was just some cool idea but not big enough to write. I didn’t do this but I still want to.
I wanted to track my author expenses and incomes better. I sort of am, but it’s still a mess. Taxes are always a headache for me every time I do them so I do still need a better way to do this both for myself and my business.
Last, I wanted to track how long specific projects were taking me to complete. I now have better tracking and data for this, so I can say that I accomplished that task this year.
Overall
The first half of the year went almost perfectly to plan. I did the things I expected to, in the timeframe I expected them to take, and I really nailed the first two quarters. Once I went to that writing conference though, I was completely bursting with creativity and everything changed.
I had to put the current projects on hold, but I started working on a fringe project in the meantime because writing is still my passion and I can’t just stop everything when something screws up my plan. I always have to have plans within plans that move me forward.
This year has gone so slowly and has felt like a slog the entire time. At the same time, how is it almost January already and where did all that time go? I can never expect my entire year to go exactly to plan, but at least when I am flexible, I know I will always keep pivoting and moving forward.
