2021 Goals

Well, I'm back. I decided I'd take an extended leave of absence during the holiday season, as I was really exhausted, dealing with some poor mental and physical health, and had a lot of other work that I needed to do. 

But today I'm here to share my goals for the year! 

After some reflection on my goals from last year, I began figuring out what worked and what didn't so that I could better develop systems to help me reach my goals for 2021.

Let's hop right into them, shall we?

~Writing~

I will probably hate myself for the crazy insane goals I have planned for this year. 

1. Complete Milwordy. This may be impossible. I don't know. I'm still working towards it, but I have no idea if I'm going to successfully complete it or not. However, I have quite a few projects that I want to work on this year and hopefully, those will put me well on my way to a million words. I want to dedicate at least an hour during my work day, preferably right at the start, to write something. This could be writing first draft words, editing, or writing social media posts. It doesn't matter, exactly, but I want to actually set that time aside daily so that I can make steady progress towards this goal. 

2. Publish the remaining books in The Pirate Hunter Chronicles. Yes, you read that correctly. Three books in one year. This might be a bit crazy, considering it took us almost an entire year to publish just one book, but now that we have some of the little details figured out (and also 2 of the 3 books are already written), we're fairly confident we can do this. 

3. Edit and pitch The Reylance Trilogy. I ditched querying and pitching it last year, as I came to the decision that it wasn't ready yet. I needed to really delve into the world building more and just make the story the best it can be. After working on TPC, I gathered lots of new ideas for how to improve it and make it better. Hopefully, I can incorporate those tricks this year and have at least the first book fully edited and the other two well on their way by the time Realm Makers rolls around. Which leads me to my next goal.

4. Attend Realm Makers. Of course, this is entirely dependent on how the whole beverage bug is looking in July, but I'm hopeful that I'll be able to make it this year. I'm very excited that it's back in St. Louis this year!  

5. Finish the first draft of The Last of the Lambs. I hope to complete this during Camp NaNo April, but I'm not 100% sure. I've been itching to get back to this story, so I may just write little bits here and there and just causally finish it up as I have time instead of dedicating time towards it.

6. Write the first draft of a super secret project. *grins* I have a project that's under wraps currently (and you probably won't get to hear anything about it for a very long time), but I'm soooooo excited to work on it!

7. Maybe write 50k of the Monsters of Our Making book 4 during NaNoWriMo. This is if I have no other projects that I want to work on in November. 

~Reading~

My motto for my reading goals this year is "Re-read and Reduce". Essentially, I'd like to both reread old favorites and also reduce my physical TBR. 

1. Reread. I want to reread both the Percy Jackson and the Heroes of Olympus series. It's been a while and I'm wanting to be back in that world (especially if we're slated to get a TV series of PJ). There are some other books that I think I'd like to reread this year, but those are the ones I know I'd like to prioritize. 

2. Reduce. I want to do something similar to Jess Williamson's TBR Takedown (more accurately, Kate Cavanaugh's spinoff of it). I plan on taking one book from each of my shelves and having it in my stack at all times, so that I always have something that I'll be in the mood for. Since I organize my shelves by genre (sort of), it'll give me a wide variety to choose from as I pick my next read. I'd also like to find which of the books on my shelves I actually want to keep. So this year might be spent with a lot of DNFs and donations if I don't like the books I pick up (Namely, I'd like to see if I'd like Captives once and for all, as I've had it on my shelf for...a very long time).

3. Read 52 books. I'm sticking with the same goal as last year. Since I'm publishing three books, I probably won't have a lot of time to dedicate to reading more. Besides, I'm very happy with how many books I was able to read last year!

~Life~

1. Memorize 4 passages of Scripture. I'd like to get at least 4 Psalms memorized. I've had this as a goal for a few years now, with very little success. The issue I've found is that I don't set aside actual time in my day to work on it. So now I want to make sure I incorporate it into my morning devotions. I've kept my habit of Bible reading and prayer nearly every morning for several years, so adding this in won't be too difficult. 

2. Master 4 advanced yoga poses. I have four different poses I'd like to work towards mastering. My goal is to have one pose per quarter. I'm planning on revisiting the classes that feature them every other week or so, depending on how quickly I progress towards mastery. If things are going slowly, I may have to increase how many times I repeat the class. 

3. I want to make time to interact on social media. I haven't been commenting on peoples' posts as much as I would like. Whenever my depression gets bad, I find myself curling in on myself and not interacting as much as I would like. So I'd like to return to my previous system of spending about 30 minutes to an hour per weekday on blogs, Instagram, and maybe YouTube and interacting on peoples' posts. 

4. Make progress in therapy. I'm hesitant to put any quantitative restraints on this goal, as I don't know what progress will look like for me. Mostly, I'm hopeful that I'll be able to identify areas where my depression gets in the way of me living life. I'm sure I don't even know the half of where I'm struggling. I've grown so used to this way of living that I don't even see it as a result of mental illness. So I guess that's my goal. 

5. Meet up with Helena once a month. For 2020, we had all these plans to meet up every month and do something together. We did great for January and February, then Covid happened and we struggled to do much else, though we did have a few fun outings afterwards. This year, we're planning on trying again, even if the meetup is just going to a book store or taking a walk on a greenway. 

Welp, there you go!! Those are my goals for the year (most of them, anyway). We'll see how things go!

Onto y'all! What are some of your goals for 2021? What are systems that you plan on putting into place in order to accomplish your goals? Let me know all the things down below!!