Everybody Loves a Year In Review, Right?

Here we go, a tag-team follow up on yesterdays post pertaining to Goals and Dream Killing. Hopefully you’ve had some time to gestate on the year currently bidding us adieu, and the one about to kick down the door with size 2015 boots.

Next week I’m gonna sit down and lay out my goals for 2015, but before we do that, let’s take a moment and dissect the last year and it’s goals.

At the start of 2014 I was in a weird place in my life, emotionally and physically (I’d just moved out of my van which I’d called home for a couple months). I’d been consistently writing on average 1,000 words a day for the past few years, and while that was great practice and helping me churn out a lot of material, it wasn’t enough.

Not for me atleast. I had all these ideas simmering, so many stories to be written, and not enough time to get them all out of my skull. So the first goal I set for myself was to make more time. Working a full-time job limited the ways I was free to do this, but by setting the goal to wake up every morning at 4:45, I was able to loosen up a couple hours of undisturbed writing time before work. That, in addition to keeping my evening writing session, equalled a metric shit-ton of words for the year.

But would it be enough to hit the goal of 1 million words for the year, aka around 3,00 words a day? Well, things started off strong. Didn’t miss a single day of writing up until June and then BAM! Just as Time Heist was nearing the final phases of production, I hit a wall. I lost my confidence and wholly decided the whole thing was a lesson in futility.

I stopped writing. Didn’t put a word onto the paper between June 1st and August 1st. I kept telling myself, take a day off, it’s okay. You’ll get back to it tomorrow. Then tomorrow came and I’d say, ehh, what’s another day gonna hurt?

It’s that sort of thinking that derails us. If you give yourself too much leeway, too much rope, you’ll find a way to get it twisted around your neck all stupid like. Writing by nature is a solitary act, and nobody is gonna make you do it. Nobody will throw your ass in the chair and say, type word-monkey type!

Trust me, I wish they would. But they won’t. So you got to be your own worst boss. You have to make yourself do the things you don’t always want to do.That’s hard.

On August 1st I said, enough. I’m not a writer if I’m not writing, it’s simple logic. If i want to be a writer, I must write.

So I did. I sat down: ignoring the fact that I was 60 days behind my goal of a million words for the year: ignored the fact that Time Heist was three months behind schedule for its release: and I started writing.

I’m proud to announce I haven’t missed a day since. And that’s the thing about goals, routine, and schedule. You make it part of your habit, and you find a way to get it done. It’s that simple. If you make excuses, you’re hurting nobody but yourself, so knock that shit off.

Okay, with less than a week until the New Year, where do I stand on my writing goal? Am I gonna make a million words?

Oh yeah, I did that awhile back, actually. Currently I’m sitting at about 1.5 million words written for the year. Which if you take into account the 60 days of writing I missed, equals just shy of 5,000 words written every single day.

Are all those words any good? Meh… probably not. But that’s okay, ’cause I didn’t set out to write a million good words, that’s not really something within my control. As artists we are pretty poor judges of our own work, so who’s to say what is good and bad. I just treat them all like red-headed step-children and assume the words hate my filthy guts, which I’m okay with.

So, I hit that goal, but I whiffed pretty bad on some others. I’d set out to publish Time Heist, Infinity Lost, Mind Breach, and a whole slew of short stories/novellas by the end of the year.

In the end I got Time Heist, Parallel, Sins of the Father, and Standing Kill Orderlies out there.

Not bad, but it wasn’t what I set out to do. Does that mean I failed? Sure, you could say it like that, but you’d be a dick.

No, I’m just kidding. We do ourselves a disservice by ignoring our failures. Sweeping them under the rug and pretending they never happened, or that it didn’t matter cause we didn’t really really try (whatever that means).

I missed my publishing goal for the year, I admit that. But I’m not gonna beat myself up over it. Nothing productive would come from that. Instead I have to pivot, adapt, and try again.

The last goal I set for myself was to read 100 books this year. I read a lot, so this is actually a fun goal for me ’cause I know I’m reasonably assured to hit it each year. This is one of those obtainable goals that are great fun to check off.

As of today, with a week remaining in the year, I’ve read 110 books. I’ll post up that list in a couple days with some thoughts and opinions on which books got my juices pumping and which ones made me want to gouge my eyeballs out with unsharpened pencils.

Okay, this turned into a blather-fest, but now it’s your turn. What sorts of goals did you set for yourself this past year? Did you hit them? Miss them? Get down to the comments and celebrate your successes AND your failures!

Anthony