Monday, January 3, 2011

Goals for 2011

I am blessed with four wonderful critique partners (who probably wonder why I don't provide more material to critique). We get together weekly to go over each others pages, or sometimes just talk about writing, books, RWA, and the like. Writing-slacker that I am, I look forward to Tuesday nights because it is time that I can't be distracted by kids and laundry and work and those-who-don't-read-romance :)

Before Christmas, we went out to dinner at Macaroni Grill instead of to the bookstore where we normally meet. The choice of restaurant was driven only partially by the yummy food. They also have paper tablecloths and crayons. We ate, we talked, we set goals. And when we left, we took our goals with us.

Here is a bad snapshot of mine for 2011. First off, I am about 40,000 words into a fantasy romance currently titled Unbreakable. I want to finish the first draft of this book this year. It's shaping up to sit on the epic side of fantasy (probably over 100k words, maybe 120 or more). And I'm really enjoying it.

My second goal is to finish a short story/novella that is vaguely related to Unbreakable. I'm like 7000 words in and aiming for the 15-20k mark. I was completely silly and started this last September thinking I'd have it knocked out before NaNoWriMo in November. Hah. I should finish it this year. Sooner rather than later even.

I also have two partials that I want to complete: One is another book in my Alien world (nope, didn't learn my lesson the first time around...someone will want to read these eventually right?). The other is to write a partial for another short contemporary romance. I have a nice start to it (about 5 pages that I'd probably not keep, plus pages of brainstorming notes) :)

I have a few other goals. Editing. Querying. Querying some more. Staying a bit more on top of critiquing for those wonderful (and patient) friends of mine.

And I have one anti-goal. No Contests (with two minor exceptions: my own chapter's contest, since its a fundraising thing that I benefit from, and the Golden Heart. Maybe).  But the RWA contest circuit has done me more harm than good this past year--one entry was actually a contest finalist, and I had two other close-calls (where I was 4th when only top 3 were recognized). And I had quite a few more that came nowhere close to the top. In total, I spent a lot of money for no return, and spent a lot of time tweaking the same few pages instead of editing entire books or writing new pages.

How about anyone else? Any goals? Planning to finish a manuscript (or 5?)  Sell something? Promote something?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Good luck with your goals! They definitely sound doable. My main writing goals are to query more, write another YA, and revise two other manuscripts that are finished, but definitely not "done." (I've finally realized how important revising is.)

Happy New Year!