Goals and Accountability

It’s been a while since my last accountability post and since it’s the start of a new month and I happen to enjoy writing such posts, I might as well start August out right.

Now, just because I haven’t been posting about my goals, doesn’t mean I haven’t been setting them. In fact, at the beginning of June, I sat down and wrote out my goals for each of the next twelve months. Granted, these were strictly my writing goals and I guess there’s more to life than writing (I mean, I’m not 100% certain about that, but people tell me it’s true and who am I to argue with people?).

What Did I Do in July?

My writing goals were as follows:

1. Work on revising my Work-In-Progress.
2. Continue querying my polished Manuscript.
3. Keep submitting two short stories to markets.
4. Attempt to revise two short stories I wrote two years ago and have been sitting on.

Overall, I was successful in achieving my writing goals. As of this writing, I’m 80% of the way through this round of revisions. I researched more agents for my manuscript and sent out more queries and follow-ups. I kept submitting one of the short stories, but not the other because it’s being held for consideration by the market I submitted to back in June (yay!). As for revising the other two short stories: one, I revised and the other I decided to set aside so that I can break it out into a longer narrative during NaNoWriMo this November. Additionally, I finally finished the first draft of another short story that I’ve been wanting to write for a couple of years now and just couldn’t figure out.

So, overall, I did really well with my July goals and I gave myself a star (no, that’s not a joke, I literally put a star sticker in my notebook to mark the successful completion of my to-do list, cuz I’m an adult like that).

August Goals

So, as far as my August writing goals go, they’re pretty much the same as my July goals:

1. Finish this revision pass on my WIP
2. Keep querying.
3. Keep submitting finished short stories.
4. Further revise two or three other short stories and submit to Beta Readers for feedback.
5. Write at least one new short story.
6. Do some prewriting for a project I want to work on sometime in 2020 in order to assertain what kind of research and worldbuilding I need to do prior to finalizing my outline of Draft 1.

But don’t worry, I also have goals outside of writing. I know, it’s hard to believe, but yes I have a life outside of words and made up worlds.

1. Work on and finish two sewing projects I’ve been planning for a while now.
2. Keep organizing my wedding (um, so yeah, I got engaged during the stretch of time I wasn’t blogging. Yup, that’s a thing).
3. Apply for jobs in Australia (I’ve been doing this already, but still haven’t found one, so just gonna keep screaming into the abyss until the abyss decides to scream back).
4. Set up my profile on a freelancing website.
5. Keep getting out of the house and interacting with people other than my person and his family. I’ve been doing better at this lately, but I want to keep up the good work.

So that’s that. My August goals.

Thanks for Reading!