Goals For 2012

So here is my goals post. I don’t think I did one last year. Weird. I think I got distracted in December and then I was in the bat cave not speaking to anyone on the Interwebz through most of January. Prior to that bat cave hiatus, 2010 was the year of the Sabbaticals. I was always “taking a break” from the Internet. Now, in a lot of ways I’ve pulled back so much I’m practically a hermit, with the exception of email, my own blog, my own facebook, and my twitter. And I like it that way. It’s SO much less drama. Though there are still occasions where I still do or say something stupid which courts more drama.

My big issue with “drama” is that it is a time suck which takes me away from writing and it’s a creative energy suck which makes it hard to write when I do pull myself away from the nonsense. So it’s just completely unproductive to my process and I want nothing to do with it. This is why I no longer comment on other people’s blogs or on writing/publishing forums. I need to hoard that creative energy for my own purposes.

So here are the goals for 2012:

1. Read 50 books. It doesn’t matter if they are fiction or nonfiction. I just need to be engaging regularly with the written word and that’s about a book a week. I’m probably going to create a private/personal Goodreads account, not related to my author account so I can just list the books I read. (i.e. I don’t want a friend list or people “watching me read”, I just want a convenient place to store a private list.) I feel like “reading in public” would lead to writers sending me their books. I don’t like to read by request. I want to read what I want to read when I want to read it with no obligation real or imagined attached to the act.

2. Write 365,000 words. That was my goal for this year, but I didn’t even come close. Therefore I’m going to keep the goal the same for next year. The difference for 2012 is I’m not going to have a word quota per day. I’m going to just focus on getting work done and out the door. If I’m focused in that way, the word count will come.

3. Trust those I hire more to do what I pay them to do. Try to micromanage my cover artist and audio people less. They are fabulous at what they do and that’s why they are on my team. I have no reason to doubt their talent or the quality of their work. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to pay attention to quality, just that I’m going to try to micromanage other people’s creative process less and trust they know what they’re doing.

4. Start developing a new pen name. With increased productivity, someone is going to start crying about my speed and how I must be “rushing crap out the door”. The fact is that I spend the EXACT same amount of actual time on a project whether I have a work ethic about it or only work one day a week while spending the rest of the time laying around watching soap operas. Also, I’ve found that the faster I write a rough draft, the cleaner it tends to be (because I stay out of the critical internal editor mode and in creative mode). When that happens, the work tends to need less editing/overhaul… so where exactly is all the “extra time” a book is supposed to take me? I have to be true to my own creative process. At the same time, I’m going to have to spread it out over more pen names than I currently have to avoid drama… and also to keep from having all my eggs in one author basket.

5. Ignore the Internet as much as humanly possible. 2011 was the year of “easing away from arguing on the Internet”. I’ve done pretty well with that and I want to continue in that direction. The more hermit-y I am, the less insane I am. That’s good times. This ignoring includes ignoring reviews, unless someone is specifically reviewing something that I’ve requested them to review. Unsolicited reviews will be ignored… unless the reviewer emails me personally to tell me about the review. I’m happy to read something you wrote about my book if you ask me to read it. I am not, however, going to just read random reviews for the hell of it. When the work goes out the door, it’s EXACTLY what I want it to be. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it is my best attempt at sharing my vision for the work. The things some readers don’t like about it, I KNOW going in what those issues are. I am not changing how I write or my vision, so reading unsolicited critiques will only serve to annoy me.

6. Streamline marketing. This is another thing I’ve worked on during 2011. I want to stay focused on the limited and focused way I market since almost everything else I’ve tried seems to produce lackluster results, and I don’t want to waste time on it when I can be working on getting more work out there. Plus, any time I do something marketing related that has me on the wrong end of the 80/20 rule, it depresses me, which makes it harder to be creative.

7. Balance in other areas of life. Eating healthy, exercising, keeping my house reasonably well-maintained, spending time with family and friends. Basically knowing when to put work away (as much as a writer really can).

So that’s the goal list for 2012. I feel these goals are reasonable and many of them build on previous progress.