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State of the Book

2017 in review and goals for 2018

I tried to look back at the year, and went through all my notebooks to find my goals, especially my writing goals, for 2017.

Seems I never quite committed to anything.

Now I’m always on the fence about goal-setting. I hate not reaching them but if I don’t set any I can’t see if I failed or succeeded.

I did find something I wrote on ravelry on December 8th 2016, though:

My plan is to use December to plan the third in the trilogy (wrote the first draft of the second in November), then I want to revise the second, and then we’ll see.

I definitely want to revise all three of them into something publishable. I hope I can get there eventually.

And while it did take me a little longer to plan that novel (it always does, I need to plan differently – or write faster) that is pretty much what I did. I wrote the first draft of the third novel, revised the second, and then got sort of stuck.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the person who is reading novel one. I gave it to her at the end of August, and it seems she has been busy.

Right now I am in the middle of finishing this year’s NaNoWriMo-novel, the first in a series of paranormal mysteries. So far I’m liking it but it’s slow going. There was some health stuff, and other projects, and so I haven’t spent a lot of time on it. I’m pretty sure I can finish the rough draft until the end of the year, though.

My hopes for 2017 had been to finish and publish the trilogy. That didn’t happen. So I am making goals for 2018 this time. Here they are:

  1. Get all four novels in progress finished, and as publication-ready as they can be.
  2. Overhaul all three websites (personal blog, writer blog, teaching website).
  3. Save enough money to publish at least one book.
  4. Find a critique partner.
  5. Find beta readers.
Now that I’m looking at those goals I can already see a potential problem in there. When I wrote „save enough money to publish at least one book“ in my mind that was the same as actually publishing it. But there are more steps involved, aren’t there? Finding and editor or two, having cover art made and a cover (I’m guessing but that’s probably about ten more steps in itself), formating the whole thing, uploading and such.
I am also not quite sure about the beta readers. But I should try it. Anybody volunteering?
 
I do have high hopes for next year but then I’m such an optimist. I always have high hopes for everything. So I’m raising my glass to the next year a bit early, and am hoping that I’ll actually manage to put the work in so that this can happen.