If you don’t fight for your dreams, they don’t happen. In the same way, if I don’t express my resolutions, they fade away.
Goals need to be defined. I won’t just work on a book, I’m going to finish the third book in my Wild Crime series and submit it to my publisher. I’m not just going to expand my marketing reach, I’m going to spend two hours every week focused on social media. I’m going to set a marketing budget, something I’ve never done before.
This year, too, with the completion of my Wild Crime series, I will launch a new mystery series. I won’t have much to say about this one until later in the spring, but I can’t wait to get started. I have other writing goals too, such as a third mystery series, and dipping a toe into the world of audio books. However…
First things first. That’s another lesson I’ve learned about goals. Stay focused. I know what my monkey brain wants most – to jump from idea to idea and never settle long enough to finish anything. If I get a brilliant idea, I jot it down and return to work. Ideas flow easily, the follow-through is what’s difficult. I need to wait until there’s the time available to thoroughly develop a concept. Brilliant ideas will stand the test of time. If it’s not just as incredible later when I have time to develop it, then it was never so great to begin with. Writing a book takes a long time and if I allow too many interruptions, I’ll never finish.
And there will be interruptions. My family always comes first. My first grandchild was born in 2018 and my daughter is getting married later this year. My son lives in a nearby state and we make sure to fit in a few trips a year to visit. I love to travel and those trips will distract me from my writing. I run a writing group (called Shut Up & Write) and also a literary journal (Potato Soup Journal), and those are weekly commitments as well. The unexpected will happen too, and unplanned events will delay my writing goals. So, I will expect the unexpected. But I’ll return to my resolutions, pick up where I dropped off, and keep marching forward. There’s nothing wrong with a mid-course correction.
2018 was a great year and I can’t wait to see what will happen in 2019. There’s a long road ahead. It’s time to get to work.
