Goals, past and present.

I’ve been blogging long enough now that I am able to use this site as a record of my life. Sometimes I need or want to look back over the novels I’ve read (check out my bookshelf in the right-hand column there if you’re curious), other times I want to justify a period of low output (I can now say objectively that having a baby totally messes with my daily page output), and when the new year rolls around, it’s fun to look back on the resolutions I made 12 months ago to see how I did.

Here are the goals I set last year:

I’m going to finish my Northern California book by the end of January.

CHECK

I will finish the current draft of my novel.

Eeerrrrr…. almost.

I will get new business cards,

CHECK

and here’s the biggie – I will double my writing income from 2011.

SO CHECK.

That last one is, of course, thanks to the official job that has not only (more than) doubled my income, which, lets face it, wasn’t very high in 2011 (please refer to the above mentioned baby), but also brought in health insurance for the whole family. Stable income is nice. There, I said it.

So I’m 3.5 in 4. Not bad, really.

Here’s the revised list for 2013:

I will finish my novel (I’m so close, I really am).

I will drink less coffee (official goal is no more than two cups a day).

I will finish the Tough Mudder this April in Vegas (woo hoo).

I will finish two short stories and submit them to journals.

I’d like to say I’ll start the next novel, but really, I think that’s just setting myself up for defeat. Besides, it’s already outlined in my head. If you count what’s in my head, I’ve been working on the second novel for about 6 years now.

So let’s stay out of my head and I’ll just put down “”Start novel #2” as an alternate goal, you know, in case I plow through those other ones and need more to do.