Sabrina's 2015 Writing Goals

I've never been much of a goal maker. And given how unorganized I am, maybe I should get in the habit, to help focus my thoughts and practice accountability. In that spirit, here are my writing goals for 2015. They are, other than #1, are rather limited. That's because I have a variety of stresses in my personal life to deal with before I can reroute all of my energy back to writing. A girl can only spend so many hours a day in front of a computer..

1. Finish and publish (?) Pyromancy 
I'm so excited to write this book, especially after reading reviews and comments and reader theories on Prophecy of the Six. This book is going to be amazing, people.

2. Finish and publish various short stories. 
The first draft of my 'Curse Story' is sooo close to being done. I've got to get that finished, polish it up, and send it to the first round of beta readers. Oh, and at some point I should give it a working title.

And then I want to get working on the other two short stories, the one with the firebirds, and the one with the house in the wastelands. Those are just little embryos of ideas right now though.

Really, I have to get back in the habit of writing. I took a break, had technology chaos (got the new laptop working now!), and took care of a wide variety of other things, but it's time to set up a schedule. It's weird for me to manage my own writing time, instead of working out a schedule with other people. I'm somehow more productive when I know others are depending on me, fancy that. :)

3. Do some research on my next solo novel. 
 As time allows, I want to do some more research for the next novel. I think I'd start with the setting - it's going to be alternate world fantasy, but set in an era equivalent to some time between 1900 and 1915. I should probably add figuring that out to my official list of goals. I'm sort of playing in the world already - both the curse story and the firebird story occur in the same world as the novel, though in slightly different time periods.

So I need to get myself back to the lovely UCSD library and look up fashion and culture, cars and farming equipment, economies and cityscapes. I can't wait. And in the meantime, I can think happy thoughts about Kate and Alex and Vivian and that guy I haven't named yet, along with Rhys and Ammalina and all the other supporting characters.

SPACESHIP LIBRARY

4. Educate myself on how to participate in the push for more diverse books. 
I've been rather passively following the campaigns for more diversity in fiction, but I want to do more. Being that I am white, I come from a place of incredible privilege, including that as a kid, I could find heroines like myself in books without any troubles. I want all kids to experience that sense of wonder, This article has a lot of wonderful and sad pictures from the We Need Diverse Books Campaign.
In any case, I want to do more. I want to learn how to write diverse characters, and I want to support the inclusion of diverse books in the publishing world.

So there we go - those are my goals as a writer for 2015. Here's to an amazing year for writing and everything else.

Karen's Writing Goals: 2015 version

For whatever reason, I'm dreading this post. I'm having trouble staying motivated as a writer. It's been a hard slog the last few years and writing down what I want to do is sometimes demoralizing, if I compare it to the list of things I wanted to do last year and realize it's 50% the same, for example.

But I've also made a pretty good run of doing New Year's Resolutions related to writing (it was a NY Resolution that initially got me into writing, in 2007.) So time for a new batch. What's on your list of things to do for 2015? Any places where we can overlap or share resources?

Photo credit: Flikr user: Dafne Cholet
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dafnecholet/

Straight out writing goals:

• Finish Jak the AI killer short story, send to F&SF via CC Findlay's e-submissions
• Finish Guide Me Through the Deep Space Night, 2014's nano project and the sequel to a prior Nano project, A Star to Lead Me (which is actually complete!) These books are very fun space-set SF and in Guide Me I've introduced aliens for the first time (even though I write a lot of SF, I have avoided aliens because so much of their treatment in SF is cliche. Let's hope I can avoid the traps.) 
• Finish False Magic (another unfinished Nano project.) This is my only fantasy novel and has a really interesting magic system and I'm very excited about it. At World Fantasy Con 2014 I had a conversation with a researcher/lecturer in warfare and I got several ideas for how to manage the final conflict in this one. The book is 90% done, I stopped right before the final conflict. My thinking at the time was something like, "Oh, I know what will happen now. Plus this is such an exciting spot. No WAY I won't get right back to this project." Um. er. (this was my 2012 Nano project, I believe…) 
• Finish Abnormals. What, another Nano project that isn't quite complete? How *strange*! This is my superhero story from 2013. A writer/artist friend has a great piece of art that I was planning to license to use as a cover, so the motivation here would be to finish this book and then publish it myself. 
• One more pass on Adrift. This is the only novel I wrote at a time OTHER than National Novel Writing Month aka Nano. I wrote it one summer a couple of years ago. It's a middle grade SF novel and takes place in the same "universe" as my other space-set SF novels (Convergence, A Star to Lead Me, Guide Me, etc.) It's a cute story, it's finished but I keep going back to it because I know it could be stronger than it is. I have shopped this around traditional publishing and received some encouraging rejects, but rejects all the same. I'm not sure what I hope to achieve with another pass on this, but I'm midway through it so I might as well complete the pass. Afterwards I need to decide if I want to try submitting it again or if I should just publish it myself. My awesome cover designer has a cover about 80% of the way finished for it that I *adore.* 

Whew. I'm exhausted already. ;) Each of these projects alone isn't a huge amount of work. They need 5,000-10,000 new words, but I will have to re-read the books to get to where I'm ready to write the new words. While I'm re-reading I might as well do my first pass mark-up edit (I edit on paper, so this is an amusing phase where I carry a binder around with me everywhere for a month or two, mostly not reading the novel but just carrying it with me like a boat anchor. The ways we torture ourselves as writers are many and sundry.) 

In addition to all those goals, which I'm having difficulty sorting into an appropriate order of which comes first, I also need/want to be doing more to sharpen my writing and keep myself in a creative mindset. 

To that end, some "sharpen the saw" (if you don't know about Steven Covey's 7 Habits stuff, go check it out at the link. Hugely supportive and positive life coachy stuff from way before there were people whose job titles were Life Coach.) goals and activities for 2015:

• Maintain my involvement in my online writing group. Get back into the saddle w/my in person writing group (I've missed our meetings for several months due to incredibly bad overlaps in schedule. February I should be able to get back into these twice monthly meetings.)
• At least one writing-related thing each day. Options include:
• New words
• New story ideas (sketched out roughly)
• Reading about writing (I have several very good books about writing that I should be reading and am not…like for instance:)
• Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer
• Shadows Beneath by the Writing Excuses crew
• Listening to podcasts about writing
• Watching videos of writing (particularly the Write About Dragons stuff of Sanderson's. He seems to have outlining down to a science and that's my kryptonite, so I'd like to get through more of this material and see what I can pull into my own process.) 
• Journaling, with some eye toward documenting progress on writing goals or other meta-writing
• Another writing class, probably a virtual class. I don't anticipate traveling for writing workshops or conferences this year but that may change as the second half of the year takes shape. I'm most strongly considering a Dave Farland class, but there are many others. If I were to go to an in-person workshop, I'd probably consider the Superstars Writing Seminars first. The Writing Excuses cruise sounds great, but I can't take that much time away from my family.