I feel as though I’ve finally started to strike a good balance between work, life, and writing, so I think I’m ready to start making public goals again. When I previously worked full-time, I would write in 15-minute spurts before and after work and during my lunch break. This was an extremely productive strategy for me. So, for the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to write for at least 20 minutes each morning and while things aren’t progressing as quickly as I’d grown accustomed to in my almost three years as a full-time writer, at least I am progressing. I’ve also recently worked through a block on my novel revisions (thank you, Christina), and I feel confident in making progress on that front.
With these recent developments, I feel confident making the following writing-related goals:
Submissions
I haven’t submitted much this year because I’ve been revising my novel and fine-tuning the stories I have already written. However, without submission goals, I haven’t been working on my short stories at all except to fiddle around with new ideas. I have a few stories that are very close to being submission-ready, so my goal for June is to submit one story each week for the rest of the month for a total of four submissions in June.
Collaboration
I’m working on a short story collaboration with a friend due for submission by the end of June. Our goal is to write 300-words apiece each week, leaving us the final week of June for submissions. This is a project I’m excited about, and I’ve got a built-in accountability partner in my collaborator. Still, I thought I’d create an extra layer of accountability for it in a public space.
Revisions
Now that I’m unstuck with my novel, I’m excited to get back into revisions. However, I’ve been finding that when I do take time to write, I’m more likely to want to work on a short story because of how rewarding the process is in the short term. Novel revisions take so much time and don’t provide much immediate gratification, whereas I can knock out a rough draft for a short story in a morning. Novel revisions also have many moving parts as a seemingly minor change can have cascading effects that I need to track. As such, I’ve been procrastinating on my novel revisions. This month, I’d like to get through revising two chapters of my novel. It might not seem like much, but I think that’s what I can handle with my current bandwidth and attention span.
Short Stories
I have one short story that’s almost complete that I want to push through and finish drafting so I can get critiques on it. It’s much more straight-up horror/gore than what I typically write, and while I’ve got the plot pinned down and written, I’ve glossed over the gory bits or haven’t written them yet. I need to sit down and write these parts out, as they represent the story’s mounting stakes and the consequences of the protagonist’s mistakes. If I finish a draft of this story this month, I’ll be happy to have gotten it out of my system and ready to move on to something else in July.
While I have quite a few writing related goals for June, I think they’re manageable and I’m excited to work towards them.
Thank you for reading!