Feels a little silly to be setting any goals for 2021, to be honest. If 2020 taught me anything, it's that plans can become meaningless fairly quickly.

But I live in hope, and so I want to enter the year, like I always try to, with some goals in mind for my writing.

Goals from 2020: How did I do?

First, a look back at how I did on 2020's writing goals:

Write four short stories

Hahaha, nope. Not even close.

The story I started just after setting that goal? The one I'd been chewing on for a while, and wanted to just get started on? That's the novel I'm currently writing.

It didn't take long for me to look at the outline I'd produced for the "short story" and realize it was really a novel. And since, at the time, I was already working on one novel, I shelved it. Came back to it only this November, for NaNoWriMo, and I've been chugging along ever since.

I did start a new short story, that will actually be short, but hit delays because I tried to follow the advice of Story Genius, which ran me right into a wall of writer's block. Had to hit pause that one, too, so I could start working on the current novel.

I did get one story edited, and by edited I mean "wrote an entirely new back half of the story, doubling its word count." Said story is now so long it's too long for many of the markets I'd like to sell it to. So maybe I can get credit for that one?

Finish the current novel

This one I did do, sort of.

"Current novel" here meant Prison Fall, the book I was working on most of this year (before the new novel). The official goal was to have it done, completely, ready to go to agents, etc. And it is done, in the sense that I've done multiple drafts now, one of which involved basically rewriting most of it, and I've done multiple editing passes since then to clean up the prose and eliminate inconsistencies.

The feedback I've gotten from beta readers, though, has revealed some things I want to fix before sending it out. So it's not all done, in that sense. But close enough.

Post more to the blog

This one's also a mixed bag. I started out well, conducting interviews with local writers and posting them here on the blog. I think I got three months in before the pandemic crashed down on me, wiping out the mental headroom I had to work on those.

Ditto my book and movie reviews. I had a good run of keeping up with them, but eventually ran out of steam, over the summer this time. Began to interfere with my enjoyment of the books, where I felt I had to keep notes on every little thing as I went through. Not to mention my motivation for writing them up fell away. So I stopped.

So this one's a partial success.

Goals for 2021

Oof, here we go. Is it okay if I just call a do-over on 2020, and copy those goals? No? Fine, whatever.

Finish first draft of The Last Dragon

Slow and steady. I want to keep working on the novel I started back in NaNoWriMo, and finish its first draft before the end of the year. It'll be an ugly draft. It'll have mistakes and inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies everywhere. But I can't fix it if it doesn't exist, so I want to finish it out.

Finish edits to Prison Fall

One last pass to do the touch-ups from my beta readers.

Finish The Harvest

This is the short story I was working on in October. I like the story, and I want to finish it. By finished, I mean, drafted, edited, beta read, the whole shebang.

For once, I'd like to do the full cycle of drafts on a short story before sending it anywhere. In the past, I've gone through a few drafts, then started sending it out, sometimes before beta readers get to it. As a result, the story I submit to later markets is always stronger (and very different) from previous ones.

I'd like to have submit the strongest version from the start, this time. If that means it doesn't get submitted anywhere this year, I'll have to live with that.

Post three times a week

Yes, fine, I'm copying this one over from last year. It's still a good goal.

Stretch Goal: Submit Prison Fall to agents

If I don't finish the edits till the end of the year, this'll have to wait till 2022. But it'd be nice to have this actually out the door, accumulating rejection slips, before the year's out.

Wrap-Up

So there they are: my 2021 goals.

I'm setting the bar lower this time around, because I think the pandemic is not going away in the US anytime soon. Even with the vaccine, we're seeing folks -- medical front-line workers, even! -- refuse to take it, all while hospitals are full and mask-wearing is maybe at 50%. It's going to be a long hard road to herd immunity.

What about you? What writing goals are you setting for the new year?

After two good weeks in a row, it was time for a rough one.

Had to shift my schedule up by three hours this week, for work. Well, I say shift my schedule, but...there's no way I'm going through my normal morning routine (writing, walking) at 4:30 in the morning.

So it's more like I abandoned my schedule, and then jet-lagged myself (while staying at home!).

As you can imagine, my writing output has suffered.

But it hasn't ground to a halt! I've managed to keep the writing streak alive, carving out time after work (thank the gods for afternoon naps) to make progress on both the novel and the short story, again on altering days.

Not always much progress, mind you. Several days "just get one sentence down" wasn't just a trick to get me to write, it was all I could get down.

But I did it, and I'm through to the other side, and can catch-up on sleep and (writing) work this weekend.

And reading. Surprisingly hard to read when your body is in the wrong timezone.

What about you? Have you settled into a new routine, and managed to keep with it? Or have the re-openings, patchwork as they are, disrupted the schedule you built during lockdown?

976 words written so far this week.

I'm slowly getting back into my old habits: Walking/jogging in the morning, writing during my lunch break, getting in a language lesson at the end of the day (I've decided to take up Swedish. Don't judge me).

And it shows. It's getting easier to slip back into the novel every day, easier to make the edits I need.

I'm still daydreaming about a couple of short stories I've got floating around in my head, but I'm trying to keep my actual write-and-edit focus on the novel. Because I'd like to be done, or at least done enough that I can send it out to beta readers.

Which will need to include sensitivity readers, I'm realizing. Several of my POV characters are African-American, and I want to be sure I do their perspectives justice.

Depending on their feedback, that could mean I end up doing a lot more rewrites. Or having to scrap the book altogether, if doing right by those characters turns out to be beyond my reach. I hope not, but...I'm not exactly in the best place to judge that.

So I'm going to ask for help. And listen, when that help is given.

Till then, all I can do is write the book as best I can, and hope.

Wife made it back from Arkansas on Tuesday (huzzah!), so my hermit-writing time is coming to a close.

Overall, I think having the weekly goals really helped me. While I didn’t hit them all (mumble mumble agent-search), I hit enough of them to build up a writing rhythm, and got a lot done.

All told, I’ve:

• written two new short stories, and have started a third
• circulated three previously-written stories
• completed final-pass editing of all but the last quarter of my first novel
• reviewed nine submissions by litreactor peeps

I like writing a new short story every week, but at some point I’m going to need to work on editing them all into shape, so I can submit them. So I’ll keep that one for perhaps the next week or two, then settle into editing what I’ve got.