Goals for 2008

I'm a big believer in setting goals. There's something motivating about putting down on paper what your heart desires, as though having something tangible makes it more likely to happen. And I suspect that it does.

The key to good goal writing is to make them attainable but challenging. They should be stretch goals, ones that you can envision completing without moving mountains, but still have to put in some work to get there.

My goals for the next year of writing are:

1) Submit to Writers of the Future every quarter (no expectation on winning)

2) Complete NaNoWriMo (50,000 words baby)

3) Sell a short story to a Pro or Semi-Pro market

Attainable? Yep. Motivating? You betcha.

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Recap

NaNoWriMo was quite an experience, certainly different than I had expected going in. 50,000 words doesn't sound like much at the beginning, but after a week or so, it might as well have been a million.

In one way, NaNoWriMo is training for the real thing - writing every day and targeting a set quota. It's the ultimate in pressure-cooker, deadline-based writing. And, for my first go-around, I failed miserably, topping out at about 15k words.

My key takeaways from the experience:

- you must write, every day.
- don't expect to make-up any gap between where you should be, word-wise, and where you actually are
- take advantage of the 11 month headstart (NaNo is the same time every year!) and do some planning - outlines, character sketches, etc
- turn off the internal editor and focus completely on word count

The key question is, will I do it again? Yes, most certainly. While challenging and disheartening at points, there's nothing like the rush of working on a novel, and the idea of completing it in a month is intoxicating.