Q1 Writing Review

Or,

How I’m Measuring Up to This Year’s Goals So Far

Publicly, I only set drafting goals for this year. Privately, I’ve set some editing and publishing targets, but I consider these a lot more fluid right now and I’m not necessarily tracking against them.

I am tracking against goals, though. And there are potentially four sets (Standard, Secret, Stretch, Super-stretch), each individual goal set beyond the public ones dependent on just how well the year goes. Also, very early in the year I also changed how I was trying to approach things so that the regular weekday writing block had me working on, at most, two big things, and only one of them fiction, with weekends a little more relaxed on what I wanted to do. Not entirely sure how that’s going to affect things overall, but it’s mostly been working for me and the first quarter measures up nicely overall.

As a reminder from this post [link], the publicly set drafting goals, taking them one at a time and with the progress so far for each, are:

Novel Plotting: 1

Slow progress on the plotting for Valkyr Station, book 1. There’s no pressing need for me to get this one done this year as I already have nine (yes, really) books outlined that haven’t been drafted yet. I just can’t stop having ideas and need to flesh some of them out.

Novel Drafting: 2

This one feels a bit like cheating. I finished the first draft of The Hauntings of Fiona in late January and expect to finish the first draft of Heroic Genesis sometime in May. Not saying there isn’t a non-publicly released goal here, but I do know what the next first draft on the list is. There are a couple of editing passes on other things standing between here and there, though, so we’ll see.

Flash: 25

Five so far, so I’m a bit behind, but the summer term is on the horizon and while I’ll still have lots to do, there may be more writing time available. There’s also a bit of professional travel and a vacation scheduled, so we’ll see how it works out.

Short Stories: 10

Three so far, which is fine. Ahead of the game even, if not by a whole lot.

Non-Fiction Book: 1

I have to decide exactly how to count this. Based on the breaking up of the big secondary piece of the Memory Project, I technically finished a short one near the end of March and another short one just a week later, but those didn’t require a lot that hadn’t already been written to that point. The next one does. Or the next ones, depending on how I want to spread things.

Blog Posts: 52

I’m at 24 posted to the end of March. Yes, there have been several since, but those are technically in Q2. This goal looks like it’s going to be an easy hit unless I stop blogging altogether for some reason. That’s not feeling likely at this point, but the future is the future and may mess with plans. So far, so good.

Songs: 10

Still only at one here. We’ll see where this one leads.

Poems: 40

This target number doesn’t count haiku, and so far this year I’ve penned 33 poems of varying lengths. Another one that feels like it’s going to be easy to reach. It’s apparently a year for poetry. It’s at least been a quarter for poetry.

So this year is going pretty well so far, but there are still three quarters to go so there’s lots of time to go in either direction with the rest of the year and lots of ways for the universe to through wrenches into he works. That said, if Q2 is as good overall as Q1 has been, I’ll seriously consider posting at least some of the Secret Goals, along with the logic of how I’ve picked the numbers, or part of that logic, at least.

Be well, everyone.