Recently I hit the first of my annual writing targets when I made my fortieth story submission.  Over the weekend I hit a second of my goals by completing and submitting my tenth short story of the year, a piece called “Time Debt” (fingers crossed it sells quickly). 

While ten stories are not much output for eight-and-a-half months of writing, it’s more than I’ve managed to produce before.  I know I need to write and (more importantly) finish more stories if I’m ever going to succeed as a full-time writer.  Considering I only have an hour or so a day in which to write, I’m pleased with that output…for now.  Extrapolating out to the end of the year, I should finish around fifteen stories at my current writing pace.

This year has been a pleasant learning experience.  I really had no idea what would be good targets for my goals, so I took a stab in the dark and set targets that I thought were achievable.  I’m finding that I aimed a little low.  The optimist in me says this is a pleasant surprise: I’ve exceeded what I thought I could do.  The pessimist in me says I have a pretty low opinion of what I can do.  Good thing I’m an optimist.  At least I know that for next year I can increase the targets for all my goals, especially for the number of stories completed.  I’m thinking that twenty-five story challenge might just be in order…