Yes, it’s late. Anyway, here is the current status of the three initiatives from last year. I didn’t do all I set out to; some of it fell short. But here they are in order of completion (or not):
Read 20 books in 2015: I just finished Chuck Wendig’s Zeroes a couple days ago, but since I didn’t finish it in 2015, I can’t add it to the list. According to my goodreads account, I finished 19 other books. Didn’t quite make the goal, but I can safely give myself a grade of 95/100 for this goal. A solid “A”. Twenty books was a reasonable goal for my reading pace and other distractions, and given my pathetic performance in 2014, was a vast improvement.
- Refined goal for 2016: Read another 20 books (and I’m already 5% done!)
Write 52 Posts in 2015: This post technically doesn’t count, since it was written in 2016. My last 2015 post was about Star Wars, and was my 34th post for the year, resulting in an overall grade of …65/100. D. I barely passed. But, I passed. Or as my wife reminded me, “D is for Diploma”.
In all seriousness, I struggled with this one. I follow several blogs, and some are prolific, contributing one or more posts daily, and others are very scarce (one post/month or less). I’ll do a more thorough breakdown of the 2015 posts at a later time, but for now I realize that, while I’d like to post more frequently, I’m still finding my voice. Finding the time was an issue too; many nights it came down to “Do I want to work on ATC, or do I want to write a blog post?” Sorry, in that case, the novel writing usually wins.
While I think 52 posts was a worthy goal, I struggled to reach it and still post content that wasn’t pure fluff. For 2016, I’ll give myself a bit more time, and see if I can’t improve on what I did this year.
- Refined goal for 2016: 36 posts, or about 3/month (and this is my 2nd post for the year).
Release A Togahan’s Chance (aka “novel #3”): The goal wasn’t to actually finish ATC in 2016, although that would have been super sweet. But barring a winning lottery ticket (or a layoff), there wasn’t time. When I launched this project, the estimated date of completion (with a fairly reasonable, fatty schedule) was June 2017. I’ve made better progress than I estimated. According to the mega-schedule spreadsheet, I’m 75.8% of the way through the project, and right now I can safely commit to releasing A Togahan’s Chance at Thanksgiving 2016, or before. All the beta reader feedback has been incorporated, and I’m halfway through a final sweep before I send it off to my copy editor. After integrating all those changes, then it’s final formatting for ePub/Kindle, and that’s always a wildcard. Since 2-3 years pass in between my releases, the software and process changes, and it’s hard to predict what technical snafus will come up. And I’m trying new tricks this year with the Kindle format, which could add 2 days or 2 months to the schedule since it’s the first time through. So…
- Refined goal for 2016: Release A Togahan’s Chance by Thanksgiving.
That’s the progress; those are the new goals. We’ll see how 2016 goes.
Got a question or a comment? Something you’d like to see? What are your own goals? Let me know.
-Pete