As may be apparent, I’m currently not as gung-ho about this whole becoming-a-writer thing as last year.

Doesn’t mean I’m quitting, just that I’ll be taking it a lot easier on myself this year. So our goals for the year are:

1-Read twnety books I’ve either never read before, or which I never read critically. I’m going to go easier on myself on the actual book choices, however. No complaints if ten of those twenty books turn out to be from a midlist fantasy series or whatever. I will still be venturing out of the comfort zone some times, and I’ll definitely keep going on Proust. Beyond that, it’s whatever I want.

2-Fifty-two blog posts. These can be anything, from a one-line note that I caught Paraguayan Death Flu to more Bonus Creativity. That’s an easy enough goal.

3-Get Book the First out of my head. That means finishing the current round of editing, throwing say twelve more queries out, and if that doesn’t pan out e-publish the thing and be done.

4-Work on the actual, not abandonned Book the Second. Goal for the year is to get to the “better finish it than abandon it” stage (so probably about 66% done or so)

5-Make progress on improving this site.

Overall, the goals aren’t super ambitious I think, but I want to focus on the means this year. So our ground rules:

1-No taking on distracting projects. I’ll take paying writing work, but beyond that it’s just the projects I’ve talked about (and sorry, but the Europa Universalis Let’s Play isn’t going to pan out, at least not on a World Conquest.)

2-I have to put some work in every day on actual “writing career” stuff. It can be editing a single page of the book, just doing some updates on the tags and categories for old posts, writing one goddamn sentence in Book the Second, or whatever. For what it’s worth, I’ve put that rule into effect a bit over a week ago, and so far we’re good.

3-No putting myself into crazy pressure situations. So no big to-do lists, no challenges, no NaNoWriMo hopes.

So that’s what we’re focusing on this year.