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Posts Tagged ‘writing goals’

On Dreams and Goals

I have a friend who decided that she wasn’t happy with her life.  She has a MFA in Art, has been at her job for 9 years, has pets and friends and family where she is.  But she wanted a change.  Her dream, ever since becoming a huge fan of the TV show “Deadliest Catch”, is to work on fishing/crabbing boats.  That is her big dream, and I know plenty of people were skeptical that she could achieve it.  She has no experience with fishing or boats, she’s strong, but really short and hasn’t ever done truly heavy labor.

Did she care that many of the people around her thought it was a crazy dream? No.  She started reading about it, checking job sites, absorbing anything she could about how to get started.

Last weekend I drove her out to an interview with a crab boat captain.   Before she’d even flown back home, she had the job.  In a month or so, she’ll be on a boat, living her dream.

What does this have to do with writing? Plenty.  Dreams are important.  I know I tend to bog myself down in the nitty-gritty of the actual process.  But it isn’t just for the process that I’m writing.  I have a dream, too.  (That phrase is like “who you gonna call”, tainted by fame forever, hehe).  I don’t really talk about my bigger goals very specifically because frankly, I get a lot of criticism for them, both from fellow writers and from my friends and family.  The last time a friend asked what I hoped to do with my writing and I told answered, that friend then scoffed and said something like “yeah, I’d like to win the lottery too.”  That sort of talk is discouraging.  But I try not to let it get to me.  As I said, dreams are important because they provide something to work toward.

What’s my big dream? To consistently make 6 figures a year writing fiction.  I’d love to have a career that is a blend of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and JA Konrath.  (If you don’t know who JA Konrath is, go here and read his blog.  If you don’t know who the other two are, get out from under that rock already!)

How am I going to go about reaching that dream?  That is where goals come in.   My friend couldn’t just decide to go work on a fishing boat and then bam! it happened.  She had smaller goals that got her there (ie post on job boards, network with people, read up on the industry etc…).  My goals are all things I can control.

So here is my game plan.  By Jan 2011 I will have 6 novels and 80 short stories out on submission.  (I’m at 1 novel and 24 short stories thus far).  That is just to get my butt in gear and because I’m practicing writing a bunch of different stuff.  Starting next year I intend to write four novels and at least 30 short stories a year which is about 550,000 words.  Half a million words seems like a lot.  Ok, maybe it is a lot.  But I broke that down into even smaller goals.  (I did this before in December, but I’ve revised what I’m doing, so now I get to toss different numbers out).

To get to 550,000 words in a year, I intend to spend at least 30 weeks a year writing 5 days a week (or really, knowing me, the equivalent time to that, probably spread out a little differently).    That’s roughly 18,300 words per week, which for a five day work week means 3,660 words a day.  Three to four hours of writing a day.  Not that scary when it is broken down like that, and it means I have time to take care of all the other stuff that crops up (like mailing stories back out: the more I have out, the more rejections that come back.  Who knew?!).

I write because it is what I do.  Getting paid for what I would do anyway? Awesome.  And that is why I have a dream, a dream that is possible, a dream that will allow me to keep doing what I do already.  And every time someone shakes their head at my dream, I’m going to remember my friend and think about her on the boat pulling crab pots.  And then I’ll smile.

Lists and Motivation

Spent all afternoon not writing because I was scrubbing my hard drive of a nasty virus.  Very frustrating.  Fortunately, I seem to have obliterated it.  Whew.  Nothing is scary like thinking about trying to type five novels on a netbook screen. Seriously.

Spent another chunk of today brainstorming titles (I like to have a working title for any project, it helps gel it in my head) and looking around at what is out there already.  I also secured three website domains for my pen names after making sure the names weren’t anything famous already.  Don’t have a YA pen name yet, but not actually sure I can write YA type stuff, so screw it.  I’ll cross the bridge when I get there.

I did some maths.  Cause I like maths.  I find doing simple math like finance spreadsheets and word count goals relaxing.  (I also find watching friends shoot zombies relaxing, I’m weird.)  In order to complete things on a schedule I feel comfortable with, I need to be writing about 105ppw (pages per week).  That’s an average of six hours of typing each weekday, five if I’m really on a role.  Over 5k words a day.  Possible.  I think I might add a weekend day to this though, just a couple of hours.  And I’m allowing in this page goal 25-30ppw for a short story, because if all I work on is novels I will go crazy from lack of completion.  Especially working on five novels.  I’m not structuring it beyond this.  Whichever novel is dominating my thoughts when I sit down to write will get the pages for that day.

My goal is to have all the novels done by September, along with at least 17 short stories.  I say 17 and not 25 because I’m giving myself room to take days and weeks off if needed.  105ppw puts me at completion of novels by about 17 and a half weeks in.  So I’m leaving wiggle room.  It would be stupid not to. Life happens.

But I’m poor.  Poor is a great motivator to write and submit things.  My dad always used to say he liked it when his kids were broke, because it meant we’d be practically begging to do farm work for cash.  And every time I’m tempted to throw my hands in the air and not write cause I don’t feel like it, well, I’ll keep in mind that this sure as hell beats 70 hour weeks and having to deal with stupid people or drunk people or dead people or things on fire.  Just in case that wasn’t enough motivation, Final Fantasy XIII comes out tomorrow.  And I’m not allowing myself to have it until these five novels are all done and in the mail.  I’ve been waiting for that game for years now. YEARS.  Sooner I get this stuff done, sooner I get to disappear for two months into video game heaven.  Yesh. Will…be…Mine! (I’m 4 years old inside, seriously).

Oh, I promised lists!

What’s out:

20 short stories.

1 novel (to five editors and an agent).

To be done list:

The City is Still Hungry, 90-100k words

Hunting Delilah, 90-100k words

To Honor and Obey, 60-80k words

The Weapons Master, 60-75k words

Menagerie, 30-50k words

Write 17 new short stories and get them out to markets.

Continue to keep existing stories out to markets.

~350,000 words stand between me and Final Fantasy XIII.  I will be … victorious.

Writers of the Future Q1 2010

Honorable mention. Again.  About all there is to say about that.  I keep joking with people that I’m going to make it as a writer “the hard way”, ie never winning a contest, never getting into one of the big workshops.  Who knows, I might actually end up having to do that.  Hell, I’ve got contingency plans for if I’ve written 20-30 novels and they never sell to NY.  It could very well end up I do this whole damn thing the hardest way possible. Sigh.

Meanwhile, I’m not even close to that point yet.  This week I’m giving in to my brain’s desire to write five novels at the same time.  Well, the five that it will let me outline.  Sindra’s Storm is being back-burnered until it grows a cohesive form.  Take that, novel.  I’m hoping that as I get going on the various projects that one will take over.  But worse comes to worse, I’ll have five novels done in the next few months.  It’s not as much work as it sounds like.  I imagine three out of the five will be short novels, one possibly very short since I’m going to try writing it as a middle grade.  So even being written much at the same time, the finishing dates should stagger out nicely.

I also am going to try to work in more short story writing time.  I’m feeling incredibly poor, and as my father always said, poor is motivating.  The more work out to markets, the more likely I am to get a sale.  Never thought I’d empathize with Dickens.  Life is full of surprises.

Also, my blog seems to be doing weird things.  Catagories and links are apparently missing, but yet they show up in my admin pages.  Sigh.  Not going to worry about it right now.  Hopefully Word Press will get around to fixing whatever is broken.

New Year, Specifically

So first, more info on my short story sale.  It’s to Alienskin Magazine and is (of course) a flash fiction piece.  I’ll be posting a link when it is up, which will be for their Feb/March issue.  I’m really excited.

Secondly, I figured I’d post a little more specifically on my goals for this year.

1. Write 4 novels and submit them

2. Have at least 30 short stories in my folders and keep them out on markets until they sell or have nowhere to go

So, both of these goals require writing more stuff.  I broke it down to wanting to write about 465k words this year.  Which seems like a huge number of words.  But if you break it down, it’s only 1,275 or so words a day.  Which would take me maybe an hour to an hour and a half to do.  Not so bad.  But…   I can’t write everyday.  That’s just not the way I or my life works.  So I decided I’d calculate what I need to write a week to reach my goal, which works out to about 9,000 words per week.  I can’t write every week either though, since stuff comes up or I go away places, etc…  So I decided what if I write 35 weeks (or so) out of the year? That gives me plenty of time off if I need it.  This works out to about 13,000 words per week that have to get done to meet my goal.

Then, I don’t write everyday, remember? I take weekends off most of the time.  13,000 words 5 days a week is 2600 or so words per day.  2-4 hours of writing a day, 5 days a week.  That, that I can do.  See? Now it’s manageable.

I think I’ll start… Monday 🙂

End of Year Wrap-up

This year was my first for submitting my work for publication.  Over all, it was frustrating, but I think I made a lot of progress as a writer, so it could have been worse.

My ‘stats’ for the year:

8 short stories written.

1 novel finished.

38 rejections, 26 of which came with personal and generally positive notes (only one neg note).

1 novella finished, 1 started.

1 novel started and not finished.

Multiple writer friends connected with, and a ton of information and good advice gleaned (hard thing to quantify, but man I’ve learned a lot this year and really expanded my support/information network).

All in all, not that bad considering that grad school hijacked by time and energy for a while, as did family/obligations for much of last summer.

So I close out 2009 still unpublished, but a better writer.  I’ve learned how to finish things, I’ve stopped being afraid of writing dialog, and I have some idea of what I want to accomplish in the future and how to start doing it.  I also developed some pretty good writing habits, which I hope to continue and improve upon in 2010. And I seem to have more or less gotten over my crippling fear of submitting my work or letting other people read it at all.  Go me.

Update:  I do not, in fact, finish 2009 without selling a story.  Sweet.

New Year’s Resolutions, Early!

That’s right, I’m bucking the trend baby.  I’m posting my writing resolutions early.  Sit back and be amazed at how high my expectations can soar.  Though I am keeping the goals/resolutions limited to things within my power.

1. Write 4 novels and submit them

2. Have at least 30 short stories in my folders and keep them out on markets until they sell or have nowhere to go

3. Finish everything I start

4. Submit everything I finish

5. Keep track of receipts and other things for taxes (I was abominable about it this last year, sigh)

6. Try writing at least three things outside my genre comforts (mystery, horror, erotica, something…)

7. Keep going, never look back, never surrender and all that

That’s it.  Well “it” is pretty relative here.  That’s a lot, I think, but not out of the realms of possibility.  And it will get a lot of things out there were someone might see them, which is a good thing if I want to ever actually make any money at this whole “my job” thing.  Yep.

Mind: Blown

Went to Orycon this weekend, spent too much money on art (damn you awesome artists at conventions, why do you tempt me?), and attended some panels where I learned some things, had other things I already knew drilled deeper into my head, and generally had a decent time.  The insomnia issue meant I had a very short energy buffer for dealing with people, but I adjusted (and spent Friday night sitting in a hotel room playing Magic the Gathering).

Also had lunch with an author/friend who was very reassuring even if yet another story of 10+ years of toil= overnight success is somewhat daunting.  But after 10 months of trying to be a working writer, I suppose I shouldn’t complain yet.

Came home to yet another ‘nice’ rejection and felt like tearing my hair out and giving it all up for the ghost, but decided to haunt the internets instead.  On a suggestion from aforementioned writer friend, I signed up for Dean Welsey Smith’s novel workshop in Feb.  I Hopefully that’ll get me on a good path to selling this thing.  As prep I decided to read all of his blog last night.  Mind blown.  Seriously.  There is some fairly tough to hear information contained in his posts, and I’m not sure all of it would work for me, but there are things I think I should give a shot.

What especially called to me was the publishing as numbers game.  I agree wholeheartedly that writing is practice, and rewriting/editing isn’t really practice, though I do think some things can benefit from a pass or two.  But the only way to get better that I’ve found is to write new things taking what I’m learned worked or didn’t work from the stuff that came before.  I also was floored by the whole goals side of things on Dean’s blog.  I like the idea of having a sort of shoot for the moon longer term goal and then shorter term goals entirely within your power.  I started this blog to record my journey to write ten novels in ten years, but really, wouldn’t it be cooler to publish ten novels in ten years?  According to Dean, that means I should write 3 novels a year.

At first, that number looks crazy daunting.  But really, is it?  At the pace I write novels, I can get 100k word novel done in about 2 months.  Then take a month off to let my readers weigh in and have a month to revise/clean up.  Send it out, rinse, repeat.  Really, not that bad.  And I could use the month off between edits and writing to work on short stories.  I aim to have 30 shorts making the rounds by next year, I’ve got 10 now, with two more that will be sent out in about a week as soon as I take another pass at them to catch the last (hopefully) typos and such.

So that’s where I am.  Going to revise Chwedl this month, write a couple new stories, get something in for 1st quarter WotF, and get started on this new novel.  Hello December.

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