2018 Goals

So, the year is slowly winding down, and that makes it a good time to look back at the Goals List I posted at the beginning of the year.

There were a bunch of writing and reading goals on my list. As well as a few other things too.

Here's how everything turned out:

• Continue this awesome habit of two daily walks (early morning & late afternoon) THIS AWESOME HABIT CARRIED FORWARD. (Monday to Friday, I go for an early morning walk first thing and then for another after dinner with hubby. On weekends we go for extra long walks.)

• Read 100 books: READ 153 (but 23 were DNFs. 😞) 

• Get back into yoga (no pressure, just adding a workout whenever): WE DID THIS! YAY. (With no pressure attached to yoga workouts, we got back into the swing of two a week. Although, we kinda fell behind during December...

• Write between 200-300k words: ENDED UP WRITING 217,590 words & EDITED 1,431 pages. (Very happy with those totals.)

• Play more games on my 2DS: UNFORTUNATELY, I TOTALLY FAILED. I HARDLY EVEN PICKED UP MY 2DS. 😣 

• Finalise spooky YA horror & query: IT TOOK A WHILE BECAUSE I ENDED UP REWRITING PART OF THE BOOK & DID AN EXTRA DRAFT (OR TWO) BUT I DID FINISH THE BOOK. (Even started the query process, took part in multiple PitMad events on Twitter. Got several requests, but still in the process...) 

• Revise 2017 novel first drafts (3): THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN. (The huge novel rewrite took so long to finalise that the thought of more revision was just too much. So I wrote more first drafts, instead. 😊)

• Write two new novels: TOTALLY DID THIS! I wrote a YA Horror with a mythological twist (77,820w) & a Psychological YA Horror (52,731w). (Both were ideas I'd had tumbling around inside my head for months. Very glad they're both outta my head now.) 

• (Try) to write a novella: ONCE AGAIN, NOPE. THIS IS THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW THAT THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN. (I usually end up writing short stories or novels. But plan to carry this goal forward to next year.)

• Keep writing short stories & sub: I WROTE THREE SHORT STORIES & REVISED THEM + THE ONE I WROTE AT THE END OF 2017. (One of these was an idea I'd been carrying around for several years, so that was especially awesome! 😆 I did sub some, but not enough.) 

• Take part in NaNoWriMo: OF COURSE I TOOK PART. THIS WAS MY 12th WIN! (The psychological horror I wrote was in a format I'd never tried before. It was challenging and fun.) 

Well, there you have it. The above is all the stuff I managed to do this year. I might have missed a few things on the list but intend to carry them forward. I'm just super excited about what I did achieve.

One thing I didn't mention above is that there were several months where I didn't actually write anything.

There were different reasons for this: hubby's annual leave, spring cleaning, etc. but a big thing that happened this year is that my head was so cluttered I couldn't decide what to work on next. EVERY STORY wanted to be told at once. But something good DID come out of these mind clutter incidents. I discovered a way to narrow down my ideas by using a notebook and spending a good chunk of time daydreaming and brainstorming.

This is a technique that totally worked for me and I've been using ever since.

2018 Summary:

Now it's time to come up with a 2019 Goal List...