It’s that time of year again – the beginning – and everyone’s champing at the bit with their glorious plans and goals for the coming 12 months.
My goals for the year broadly fall down into two things; reading, and writing.
Reading
One of my favourite things about Goodreads is the ability to set ‘reading goals’ for the year and when the year ends you’re able to see all of those books and get some cool stats on them. Here’s mine for 2015.
I think that they should probably change the term ‘least popular’ for next year. I get what they mean but it sounds more like the book was disliked than just unread – maybe they could change it to ‘least discovered’ or something like that.
Anyway, given that I managed to meet my goal of 40 books for last year I’m going to attempt to make next year’s total 50 books.
I’m also going to attempt to read further out of my comfort zones, which at the moment is fantasy and non-fiction about writing. I’ve got some other non-fiction about a range of other topics (history, other cultures, self-improvement) and am going to also read outside of fantasy and when reading inside fantasy am going to try and read outside of the usual pseudo-European fantasy.
Writing
My writing took a hit at the end of last year, mainly due to the general manic times of the holiday season and also extra work I needed to do for a job application.
I have ticked up a load of places to submit (and popped the links up here for you in case you want them too) so that I can submit some stories to these and try and get something published.
Also for the year I have a weekly word count I shall be attempting, and along with this I’ve made some very tentative plans for how this word count shall be allocated (although word counts for short story submissions haven’t been accounted for so that will probably throw the whole thing off…).
Depending on how time allows I may try and make weekly updates on how the word counts are going and whether or not I’m where I planned to be with the books I want to write (and just plain finish) this year.
So that’s pretty much it!
Lots of reading, lots more writing, and then there’s also all those resolutions that don’t fit those categories (and I won’t bore you with those!). I’ll keep you informed and hopefully I’ll be able to point to a magazine and say ‘I wrote that’ before the year is out.
Good luck to everyone for the year, I hope it’s an awesome one!