2023 Goals

Well, we've almost reached the end of 2023, so I suppose it's time to chat about my goals.

This year turned out to be packed full of stuff. My husband became a bus driver, which flipped our routine. I managed to get my writing back on track after spending so much of the last few years revising, which is fantastic. And sadly, we lost our beloved 16-year-old Loki, which broke our hearts. It's been nine months, but we still miss him every single day.

Loki was more than a cat. He was family. He was the embodiment of our apartment. And without him, it feels like something is missing.

Anyway, I don't want to get off track and get sad all over again. I'm here to talk about the personal goals I set in January.

Here's how they turned out:

• Go for two daily walks: LIKE I SAID ABOVE, OUR SCHEDULE CHANGED THIS YEAR, SO MOST DAYS I END UP GOING FOR ONE VERY LONG WALK (JUST UNDER TWO HOURS).

• Get back into yoga and schedule more workouts: ALTHOUGH WE DID YOGA, IT WAS ALL OVER THE PLACE. STILL HAVEN'T FOUND THE RIGHT BALANCE. 🫤

• Write between 100-200k words: I WROTE 190.934 WORDS.

• Read 100 books: I READ 102 BOOKS.

• Revise/finalise my NaNoWriMo 2022 first draft: YES! I ACTUALLY DID THIS IN MARCH.

• Write a novel or two: I WROTE ONE 65K NOVEL.

• Write a novella or two: I WROTE TWO NOVELLAS (45K & 30K).

• Keep writing short stories & subbing Try not to self-reject & submit stories no matter how much of a longshot it is: I WROTE THREE SHORT STORIES BUT DIDN'T REALLY SUB TO MANY OPEN CALLS BECAUSE I WAS WORKING ON LONGER STUFF.

• Take part in NaNoWriMo: OKAY, THIS ONE'S MESSY. I DID WRITE A FIRST DRAFT (65K) DURING NOVEMBER, BUT I DELETED MY NANOWRIMO ACCOUNT & WILL NEVER TAKE PART AGAIN.

• Continue playing Animal Crossing and get into some other cozy, cute puzzle games: I'M STILL PLAYING ANIMAL CROSSING EVERY DAY & PLAYED COZY GROVE REGULARLY AS WELL. I ALSO FINISHED UNPACKING, CONTINUED TO PLAY THE TETRIS 99 CHALLENGES & RECENTLY STARTED SUIKA GAME. ACCORDING TO MY NINTENDO SWITCH STATS, I PLAYED A TOTAL OF 681 HOURS THIS YEAR! WHICH IS AWESOME.

Well, that's how I did with my personal goals list! Not bad. I'm very happy with what I achieved.

Now, here are some other very cool writing highlights:

• I now have TV/Film representation! I'm represented by Alec Frankel from IAG. This is SO EXCITING!! ☺️🎉

• I signed eight contracts this year.

• Writer Firsts: I got some amazing blurbs from a bunch of awesome authors, had my first hardcover and audio book releases & my most reviewed story ever!

• I edited four novellas and two are already published.

• I wrote, revised & subbed two prequel short stories that are now available for free at DarkLit.

• The two novellas I wrote this year, I also revised & finalised. Which is a big deal because I promised myself that I would keep up with first draft revision.

• I made two covers for my own books. I made the BEAST OF BURDEN cover, and with the help of Andrew Robert, I made the cover for CHANGE OF HEART.

• I finally updated my website! This was something I wanted to do all year but didn't get to it until this month. And now that I've done it, I want to make changes when needed.

• I got the rights back for two books.

These are the novellas that were released this year:

These are the short stories available for free:

I have a Creepypasta shortie in this Cemetery Gates Media anthology:

As I mentioned above, now that I've updated everything here, I've decided to concentrate on my website/blog more. After what happened with Twitter, NaNoWriMo and Substack, I'm starting to get sick and tired of closing down accounts and starting over.

My website is my personal space, and I want to highlight it a lot more.

Also, I'm not going to bother with a newsletter for now, I setup my blog so that you can subscribe and get updates sent directly to your Inbox whenever I post here. It just makes sense, and serves the same purpose as a newsletter.

Well, this is how my 2023 goals turned out! I'm very happy with everything that I managed to accomplish. And I'm very excited because SUFFER THE DARKNESS happens to be one of the projects I worked on last year. It means that those eighteen months I spent rewriting/revising all of those forgotten tales on my hard drive was definitely worth it.

I better write up some 2024 goals soon. ☺️