Writing Goals for 2010

I did a general post on Olorinpc.com about my goals for the new year.  Here on EP, I wanted to expand a little bit about my writing goals for the new year.  I have actually managed to lay out for myself pretty well what I want to accomplish this year with my writing.  By setting goals, it gives me a mark to aim for and a reason to keep pressing on.

One of the reasons I started this site was to help myself focus on writing in general.  Participating in NaNoWriMo this year really helped me bring that into perspective.  I discovered that I wanted to keep writing – and go further with it.  Hence the “2010 Progress Meter” I now have on the site.  I did a rough cut guess and came up with a figure of how much writing I want to accomplish in the next year: 255,000 words.  That is like doing NaNoWriMo 5 times.  Sounds crazy, but breaks down to around 700 words a day.

How the heck am I going to accomplish that???  Well to be honest, I might not.  Yet if I get anywhere close, I will be much further than I am today.  This is a totally new approach to writing for me, so I have no idea how reasonable my goals are.  However, before November I also had no idea it was possible for me to write 50,000 words in a single month.

Here is how I have broken it down:

1)  Novel writing: Finish editing my first novel, bringing up the wordcount by 30,000 to a total of 80,000.  Write my second novel and lay out a third.  (Possibly writing the third during NaNoWriMo 2010.)

2) Short Stories: I plan on writing a few of these.  Most trade publications call a short story something in the 5,000-10,000 word range.

3) Blogging: I bounce back and forth from writing a lot, to not writing much at all for months in a time.  I think I have figured out why that is.  That will be expanded on below.

To expand on #3, that is why I started Epic Plains.  If I am ever going to get my novel finished (and hopefully find an agent to get published) I need to get serious about writing.  To provide some separation for readers, and myself, I decided to have a site just for my writing endeavors.  Also with blogging, I pretty much annually get back on the horse, post a lot, then get burned out.  I have tried to structure it better, but tend to have to short of a time frame.  This year I am going to be approaching it more like a writing project – planning far longer in advance.  I am currently working on 50 posts between this blog and Olorinpc.com for publication between Jan. 1, 2010 and the end of February.  The concept being if I am working at least 1 month ahead then I shouldn’t get as rushed and behind as I have in the past.  Plus, this also gives me a platform to publicize my work.  (Hopefully being able to promote publications that have published my work beyond my own websites.)

We will see how well it works.  I also don’t want to let blogging take over and get me behind on the writing projects.  So it should be interesting to find a balance between all of those projects, work, home, and the fire department.  Even so, I am excited.  My writing projects are going better than I expected and hope to start sending out my first short story in a month or two, finishing edit 1 of my novel by the end of January, and kick off my scheduled posts during this time as well.

It is going to be an exciting next year!