I’ve noticed that my year actually starts in February, not January. Sure, I try and hit the ground running on the 1st of the 1st, but the problem with January is its ability to whizz by at the speed of light. The speed of light may be how I wish I could accomplish stuff, but the reality is that I tend to spend the first month in the calendar working my way out of the massive food-and-drink stupor I fell into over Christmas.
I still write during January but I also crave To Do lists, admin, and housework. I can’t even begin to think about the whole flying without wings thing that is actually my new writing goals for the year, until I’ve cleared the decks a little.
So now it’s February and my writing goals, as always, falls into two camps: Goals I Can Achieve Easily and Goals That Scare the You-Know-What out of me.
Before I was published, “Get Published” sat squarely at the top of Goals That Scare the You-Know-What out of me—mostly on account of needing to come to terms with feeling the fear and doing it anyway. That whole “What if I fail” factor is pretty big for some of us.
To conquer the fear, and perhaps because “Getting Published” sounded a bit too amorphous, I broke it down into mini goals that felt much easier to achieve and might lead to publication. One thing I knew for certain was that getting published was made up of a shed-load of hard work and a healthy pinch of good luck. I knew I couldn’t control the luck, but I could control the hard work.
Of course what I immediately discovered after getting published was that a new set of goals suddenly appears. All authors are works in progress, and in order to keep progressing, the Goals That Scare the You-Know-What out of you are needed more than ever.
For a while this particular knowledge stank!
It would all be so much easier if the goals that helped me grow the most and helped me learn how to adapt at speed to an ever-changing industry were those easier ones. But nope—it’s the scary ones. The ones that push me out of my comfort zone, the ones where I can’t feel the ground beneath my feet, the ones that I might fail at, that are the most helpful to me in growing as an author.
This year I’m plumping for a mixture of both again; with the easier goals hopefully giving me the confidence to tackle the scarier ones. That, at least, feels familiar. And actually exciting. New-Year-new-possibilities exciting.
I might not reach all my goals. Life has a habit of going awry sometimes. That’s okay. I’ll let myself off of some of them if that happens. Not the scary ones though, because writing doesn’t stop when you’re published—like the industry, it’s ever-changing and ever-evolving. I’ll always write sexy heroes, sassy heroines and happy ever afters, but I plan to stretch myself too. And who knows what giving talks about writing might lead to? Other than panic attacks and a worse stutter, that is!
So now we’re one month into 2015. How are you getting on with your resolutions and goals? And are they ones you secretly know you’ll achieve, or are some of them awesomely terrifying but you’re not going to let that stop you?
I still write during January but I also crave To Do lists, admin, and housework. I can’t even begin to think about the whole flying without wings thing that is actually my new writing goals for the year, until I’ve cleared the decks a little.
So now it’s February and my writing goals, as always, falls into two camps: Goals I Can Achieve Easily and Goals That Scare the You-Know-What out of me.
Before I was published, “Get Published” sat squarely at the top of Goals That Scare the You-Know-What out of me—mostly on account of needing to come to terms with feeling the fear and doing it anyway. That whole “What if I fail” factor is pretty big for some of us.
To conquer the fear, and perhaps because “Getting Published” sounded a bit too amorphous, I broke it down into mini goals that felt much easier to achieve and might lead to publication. One thing I knew for certain was that getting published was made up of a shed-load of hard work and a healthy pinch of good luck. I knew I couldn’t control the luck, but I could control the hard work.
Of course what I immediately discovered after getting published was that a new set of goals suddenly appears. All authors are works in progress, and in order to keep progressing, the Goals That Scare the You-Know-What out of you are needed more than ever.
For a while this particular knowledge stank!
It would all be so much easier if the goals that helped me grow the most and helped me learn how to adapt at speed to an ever-changing industry were those easier ones. But nope—it’s the scary ones. The ones that push me out of my comfort zone, the ones where I can’t feel the ground beneath my feet, the ones that I might fail at, that are the most helpful to me in growing as an author.
This year I’m plumping for a mixture of both again; with the easier goals hopefully giving me the confidence to tackle the scarier ones. That, at least, feels familiar. And actually exciting. New-Year-new-possibilities exciting.
I might not reach all my goals. Life has a habit of going awry sometimes. That’s okay. I’ll let myself off of some of them if that happens. Not the scary ones though, because writing doesn’t stop when you’re published—like the industry, it’s ever-changing and ever-evolving. I’ll always write sexy heroes, sassy heroines and happy ever afters, but I plan to stretch myself too. And who knows what giving talks about writing might lead to? Other than panic attacks and a worse stutter, that is!
So now we’re one month into 2015. How are you getting on with your resolutions and goals? And are they ones you secretly know you’ll achieve, or are some of them awesomely terrifying but you’re not going to let that stop you?
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