Hello, New Year

This year, instead of making resolutions, I’ve made a plan. Heading into the second half of December, holiday and family obligations avalanched and, as usual, my writing ground to a halt. Instead of feeling bad about this (like I do every year), I spent those last couple weeks creating a plan for 2015.

A plan that includes not only weekends off, but writing vacations. I’m building in two weeks off at the end of December, one week in June (when school ends for my girls), and I’m keeping one vacation week in reserve to be slotted in as needed (spontaneous road trip, anyone?).

Over the last couple years I’ve established a daily writing habit and I have a good idea of how many words I can write in a typical day and how much I can accomplish in a day, a week, a month.

The plan has me drafting, revising, and finishing:

6 flash fiction stories

4 short stories (3,000 – 5,000 words)

2 novellas

1 novel

2014 was the year when a lot of my short stories grew into something longer and I ended the year with a lot of open projects as I learn to manage longer forms, both in terms of writing skills and writing time. The flash and short stories will be new. The novel and novellas are projects started in 2014 that I will finish this year.

I’m budgeting two weeks for short stories, a month for the novellas, and six months for the novel, which is really a guess. This is the novel I began late last year, so a lot of the preliminary work is complete. 

The closest thing to a resolution I have is that I intend to track my daily work in a log book. An actual paper journal, because I’m old fashioned that way. At the end of this year I will have better data to further refine and improve my process.