I’m late to the game on the whole New Year’s Resolutions thing, but I have a good excuse. With this most recent variant, the probability of catching the virus went up a substantial amount. Going by numbers in my city, it appears to be about a 20%-25% jump.
But more on that in a minute.
Story Time
For Christmas, we packed our bags, put the puppers up with a boarder, and hopped a flight (with a couple lay-overs) to Houston. Now that we’re east coasters, there are no direct flights, so we still have to transit through Calgary. It seems we still can’t escape that city!
With our pre-flight COVID-19 negative tests secured, we took the plunge. Christmas Eve was spent cooking and wrapping last minute gifts. Christmas Day was spent with my not-so-little little bro & his family, tearing into gifts, eating way too much food, and polishing off several bottles of champagne. This was a Christmas we have missed for two years. Thanks, ‘rona.
All was going well, until one morning I woke up with a scratch in my throat and a cough. I thought nothing of it. Our pre-flight tests were all negative, and we hadn’t been anywhere other than my parents house after arriving.
The day came to take our COVID tests in order to get back to Canada. And who should test positive? Me! Long-story-short, I had to stay back for a week (with a wicked stuffy nose) before being able to come home. You might think that was a perfect time to write, but when you’re suddenly away from your family, it’s super stressful. So, very littler writing was had.
Luckily about 10 days later, my PCR came back negative, and I rescheduled my flight home. I’ve been home for a week now, being a good little girl and sticking close to home unless I need to walk Mochi. It took me a few days to calm down and catch up to the fact that I was actually home before I could start writing again.
What I did for 2021
This year, I’m going to do things a bit differently. For 2021, I tried to stick to the mantra “Write Every Day.” Long-story-short, I couldn’t stick to that for more than a few weeks at a time. My anxiety would flare up to the point where thinking about opening a document to write triggered panic attacks.
My goals changed at the beginning quarter of the year to hit an easy target: 5,000 words a week. That seemed to work pretty well, and there were weeks where I blew my target out of the water.
NaNoWriMo rolled around and I told myself to commit. Write every day in November, even if it’s junk, even if it’s gibberish. Just write. I didn’t have to stick to a single project, I could write whatever the heck I wanted.
And it worked! I slammed back NaNo in about 20 days. As December started, I was able to keep the momentum going. I think I had found my magic bullet.
Resolutions for 2022
This year, starting in February, I’m aiming for 10,000 words a week. That’s only 2,000 words a day for 5 of the 7 days. At my writing speed (or word vomit speed) I can crank out 2,000 words in about an hour. That’s not a big commitment at all. This is me writing while the evening news runs in the background.
I am also going to try to keep a separate writing journal aside from my bullet journal. I’m able to stick to my bullet journal, but the contents are all over the place. I’m going to separate writing completely, and leave my bullet journal for day-to-day and personal goals only.
And that works out perfectly. For Christmas, my journaling-writer mum got me one of her favourite planner notebooks to try out. It’s called the Go Girl Planner , available also on Amazon. It’s built with three sections: Month-at-a-glance, week-at-a-glance, and free-form bullet journaling for jotting down ideas, maps, and anything else that comes about.
I set up my month-at-a-glance for now with things that are happening through the month. Come February, I will shift to only writing-related items, such as social media, targets for self-edits, and planning out timelines for my writing projects. More on that in another post.
My week-at-a-glance will be used to record and track specific goals that week. For instance, now that I’ve finished the first draft of my fourth novel in the Rose Cross Academy series, I need to self-edit the manuscript before sending it to my editor for her to chop to pieces. I will see if giving myself a goal every day or every other day to self-edit a chapter will help me through the process, or if I need less structured goals such as ‘self-edit 10 chapters this week.’
Writing Goals for 2022
- As mentioned, I’ve finished the rough draft of my fourth book. By March/April, I want to have this book edited and ready for publishing.
- Book #5 in my Rose Cross Academy series will need some work. I have a framework, I know the beginning, middle, and end, and I’ve written about 30%-40% of the novel. I’d like to work on this novel with the most focus.
- I’d like to get my publishing schedule up to at least two books a year, instead of one.
- I have (what I thought was) a just-for-fun WIP that has grown into a monstrous novel nearing 150K words (code name GM). I think this novel has potential, and I’d like to clean it up and send it out for beta reading. Part One of this novel is complete and self-edited. Part two is 75-80% done. Whether I split the manuscript into two is still up for debate. This work deviates from my previous YA novels and comes in as New Adult LitRPG.
- And finally, I have my 2021 brainstorm-turned-novel-series-idea I’m calling “Four Crows”. This is becoming New Adult as well—a pistol-and-petticoat Steampunk fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic late 1800’s North America. The premise is right before the 1890’s industrial revolution of North America, an apocalypse occurs which wipes out a chunk of the population, destroys emerging technology (such as the motor vehicle and industrial machinery), and replaces it with a watered-down form of magic. One hundred years later, as society has recovered and is gearing up for a second industrial revolution, events leading to the original apocalypse are rearing their ugly heads again.
To Wrap It Up . . .
I plan on 2022 being busy with ideas and finalizing drafts. Two of my projects are close to publishing, so I’m well on way to hitting my two-novel-a-year plan. And since loose daily writing goals worked well for me in the latter half of 2021, I’ll be experimenting on what goals I can set for myself that don’t feel like work. Life is stressful enough, I don’t want my writing to become one of them.
As spring peaks over the mountains here on the east coast, I have high hopes and good spirits heading into the year. It’s a bit disappointing that COVID gobbled up half of January, but I have a whole year to make up for it.
How are your New Year’s goals looking? If you have them planned out, are you sticking to them?
Everyone take care!
– Rissa
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