Goals for 2020

After my decade in review, some folks said “That’s great, but… what are your goals for 2020?” It’s something that got lost in all this bigger scale reflection. The thing is, whenever people ask me my goals, I get nervous. It’s complicated.

Not because don’t have goals, but because, when it comes to goals I feel like this guy:

I actually think a lot about my goals. So when people ask me what my goals are that’s not a simple question and part of me wonders “Well do you really want to know? Because bub I got yearly, quarterly, and monthly goals to go after a 10 year plan.” How deep do you want to go? Because I can go DEEP. I only tell you this so you know what you’re getting into, alright? With that disclaimer aside, let’s talk about

The Goals

Writing Goals

First up are my metric goals – these are the numbers I track in my spreadsheet. So first, I will write at least 240 hours. This is actually down significantly, but see above. I will also write at least 70% of the days. When I look back on the last few years, I actually end up writing about 55%; there would be months I would be burned out and barely touch my writing. Conversely, I would get sucked completely into a video project and work on that almost exclusively trying to get it out for weeks and it would eat my entire writing time. That happened with the Quick N Dirty videos in the lead up to NaNoWriMo last year – they’re a big reason I didn’t get as much pre-writing done as I should have. So, consistently is what I’m going for.

I will complete 3 drafts of my novel Musketeer. Last year I did write a lot and spent a lot of time writing queries. The thing is, 2019 had a lot of orphaned projects – Treasure Hunt got abandoned partway into the year because I was spinning my wheels over complicated stylistic choices. The Musketeer story got 50k into it in the spring before I was hitting a wall which, in hindsight, was purely a product of me stopping my planning too soon. While I revisited it later in the year, it didn’t get a completed draft. I even started a small Middle Grad story as something of an experiment which was originally conceived as a one month experiment to knock out in October. That didn’t happen.

Look, I queried, I completely redid a draft of the Giant Robot book, and I wrote a lot more words on a lot more novels. But writers finish their work, so dammit, this year I’m going to finish 3 drafts of my musketeer novel. That would make it ready to query by the end of the year. Look, I’m hopeful the Giant Robot book will find a home before then. I’m excited for it. That said, I can only control what I can control, and if it doesn’t have a home I want to have something else ready to pitch.

Speaking of being ready to pitch, I will send out 10 more queries for Stars of Steel and Iron. I sent out over three dozen last year; there are many promising responses and awesome agents looking at partials or fulls. That said, it’s the new year, and a whole batch of agents just opened to queries. I’m going to fire off 10 more queries to a new crop of agents to get my work out there.

I also want to work on unifying my internet presence. YouTube is great, Twitter is great, but I do want to create a more unified experience that doesn’t rely on third party companies. As such, I will launch my author website. As you are reading this blog, well, you can see how well that’s going.

Lastly, for writing goals, I will attend a writing convention. I didn’t go to one last year, really, because we bought a house. There was a quick trip to Denver Comicon, but that’s not the same as a dedicated writer convention. I want to meet up with internet friends, and also meet new people. You never know what you can learn – at the last major convention I went to (in Baltimore, November 2018), I had agents sit down and start chatting near me. I learned more in those 10 minutes than I had in 3 months perusing blogs.

Good news on this last goal! I’m going to the SFWA Nebula Conference in LA, May 28^th – May 31^st. If you’re going to be there, I’d be happy to meet up and say hello!

Video Goals

I spent a lot of time thinking about my videos. I’ve come a long way from where I started in late 2017, but I’ve also got so much more to learn. One sobering point that jumped out at me when I looked back on the last year (and really, the last few years), is that my goal of a weekly video really… wasn’t. The best I had was a streak of 5 videos in a row, and otherwise it tended to be about every other week, at best. Moving into 2020 I set out to fix that, because the professional I want to be will meet those deadlines. As such, I will release a video every week in 2020 (exception: the week of 1/1 because holidays). To help with this goal, I will keep a log of my video workflow. I realized during NaNoWriMo I don’t even know how much time I’m spending on my videos or how long an individual video takes. Hopefully a better understanding of that workflow can help me break the video work down into more manageable pieces.

One thing I pride myself on with my videos is I’m trying to learn cinematography. The standard small Booktube or Authortube is a talking head in front of a bookcase, with maybe some titles or book covers that pop up and jump cuts. Nothing else. No shame on those videos, mind – we all start somewhere, and creating something is hard. Personally, I’m constantly striving to make my videos more dynamic and more interesting. I don’t want them to just be the equivalent of me reading a blog post, but a genuinely entertaining video. To help with this general goal, I will learn AfterEffects to increase the production values of my videos. After Effects is a program that helps you create interesting visual effects, and it really opens the door to neat visual things that you can do beyond the already expansive things I can use in Premiere Pro.

Lastly, to help me keep my video workflow I will schedule my videos in advance. This is to force myself to spend time thinking about what sort of videos I want to create and what they will look like instead of me sitting down on a Saturday going “So… what am I filming again?”

Look, I’d love this year to be able to turn on monetization on my videos – every video costs me money, and Premiere is an editing software that costs every month. I’m not looking to get rich doing YouTube, but I’d really love to break even. To do that, it requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of public watch time. We’ll see what I can do; I can’t control those external factors however, so all I can do is roll up my sleeves and get to work making content every week, and being sure I give it my all to make something awesome.

Fitness Goals

Look if you wanted to see my goals, you’re going to see all my goals. And I want to keep it real – I’m in my 30s. I was never terribly athletic (turns out some of that was a heart defect which required heart surgery in 2014. Do not recommend), but years in an office are getting to me. I’m out of shape, and I want to change that. Instead of worrying about some artificial goal like a number on a scale, I’m going to stick to something clear I can control: I will go to the gym at least 3x a week. In addition to that, to help me focus, I will run a 5k this year. Having something to train for is an important step.

Other Goals

Reading is important to me and I do think it’s very important for writers to continue to encounter new ideas. The more ideas you are exposed to, the more ideas you have on your own. As such, I will read 70 books this year. A huge fact that enables this is actually me realizing I can listen to audio-books to and from work; it’s a nice way to work through the TBR stack of books I’m in love with but haven’t gotten around to reading.

The other major goal is that WriterWares will be profitable by July. It costs me every month to have the site up, and while I don’t mind putting some money into this little side experiment, by July if it isn’t pulling its own weight and eking out a profit – even a small one – I’m going to pull the plug. Sometimes ideas don’t work out, and that’s ok, but that sure doesn’t mean I won’t try to give people something of value. To make that happen and to, again, control what I can control, my goal is to work three hours a week on Writer Wares. It’s a little under 30 minutes a day.

Oh, what’s WriterWares, you ask? It’s a business I run. Mugs for the bookish – the products are located here, https://writerwares.com/collections/all .

Conclusions

Look, I told you I go DEEP on goals. So here I am, almost 1,700 words later, wrapping up. And yes, I break this all down to quarterly and then monthly goals. It’s a lot. But while it is a lot and I do spend a lot of time thinking about it, it does help me stay on track and keep oriented throughout the year.