Revisiting Your Goals

Image courtesy of pakorn / freedigitalphotos.net

Almost everyone starts the new year with a set of goals that they want to achieve, then by February they are forgotten. If you really want to keep striving to achieve them I think it is important to keep revisiting your goals and assessing your progress. It may be that other circumstances have arisen, or the goals were unrealistic to begin with. If this is the case, rather than just giving up, revise them. If your goal was to write 1,000 words a day and you continually fall below that level, set a new goal of 750 or 500 words. It is important that our goals push us, but they also need to be within our grasp. If things become too easy, increase the word count again. Our goals don't have to be static, anything that moves us forward and towards our dreams is a good thing.

With this in mind I have decided to revisit the goals I set down in my very first post (here).

• Write more - I have been consistently been using 750words.com every day (except two) to write down my thoughts about the day, any problems I am having in my WIP (there are many!), ideas for blog posts, articles etc. Unfortunately, my fiction writing is still taking a back seat and I am woefully behind now for my WriYe goal (by almost 14,000 words!!!!). Every time I look at the word count widgets in my sidebar I feel very guilty and a little frustrated. The writing I do on 750words.com doesn't count towards my fiction writing goals but I am still working through writing problems in there so to give myself a bit of a boost I have now added a widget to show my writing in there as well. Although I am behind on my WriYe goals it is still achievable and will only take 500 words a day. Once I am back on track with my WIP I am hopeful that I will be able to make up the shortfall so I am not going to change this goal.

• Have a blog up and running by mid-January - This one is complete but I obviously don't want it to stop there so I need to revise this goal to keep me moving forward. The new goal will be to keep up with the regular posting schedule and increase my readership. To help with this I have also signed up to take part in the A to Z Blogging Challenge in April. I wrote a post about it here, or you can visit the website for more information here.

• Establish myself as a freelance writer - This is still in it's early stages. I have set up profiles on a few more sites and applied for a few more jobs, but I think I need to narrow my focus and find a niche to specialise in at first, I can always branch out into other areas at a later date. I have heard there is going to be small business event taking place in my local town soon and I am thinking about attending.

• Complete as yet untitled WIP and outline the next - This goal is not going as well as the others and I have not done much work on this over the last month. At least, not much in the way of new writing, I have been working through some plot problems in my daily writing sessions on 750word.com, experimenting with different solutions, and I think I may have a few of them sorted now, enough to begin writing again. I knew that I had taken a lot on this year and gave myself a deadline of 30th June to complete the first draft. I have just worked out that I only need to commit to 304 words and I will have a very basic 50,000 word draft that I can then work on. Looking at it this way has made me feel a lot more confident that I can get back on track with this and still keep all the other balls in the air.

• Read more - My goal was to read 45 books this year and so far I have read 6 and am just about to start my 7th so I am on track.

• Try my hand at book reviewing - I have already posted a review of Robert D Smith's 20,000 Days and Counting here, and last week I received the happy news that I have been accepted as a new member of the Masquerade Crew, an indie book review site. You can see my introduction on the site here. I have just received my first book, a collection of short stories entitled Strange Love, Short Stories and Twisted Tales by Victoria Pearson. Once the review is up I will post a link to it on this site and on twitter.

So far my goals have only needed a slight tweaking here and there, but revisiting them has been extremely useful for me. I was beginning to feel like I was falling too far behind and fighting a losing battle, but now I can see just how much I have actually achieved in a little over a month and am full of renewed optimism.

How about you? How are you getting on with your goals for the year? Have you had to make any revisions? Let me know in the comments below or contact me here, I'd love to hear from you.