I’ve been away from regular posting for quite some time, and the bug to ease back into it has bitten me. Tending my website is one of the many new/old projects I want to work on in 2021. As I find it is often helpful for me to state goals, here’s a quick rundown of what I hope to accomplish, at least in the first part of 2021.

Write, write, and write. This one seems straightforward for writer, and in 2020, I got back on track with daily writing. After getting away from daily writing in recent years, I buckled down and resurrected my daily writing target (at least 500 words a day),. In 2020, I have successfully met that target, and managed to re-establish a consistent writing habit. It felt great to crank out out that production, which resulted in me writing nearly a quarter of million words in 2020. That hasn’t yet translated into many published stories yet, but the first step it to write the work.

Finish what I have started. I’ve always struggled to finish things I start, and success as a writer (and really just in general) is linked to finishing. Several years ago I started down the road of writing long-form, i.e., novels, and have published fours books over the past few years. The books are all part of a series called The Calypto Cycle. The series was envisioned to be nine books. Four are complete and available through most online retailers, the fifth is in final manuscript form, and I competed a first draft of the sixth in November 2020. I want to finish and publish the rest of this series. I also have a novella length steampunk story, and a handful of short stories written last year that I want edit, finalize, and submit to publishers. Unfinished work doesn’t get me closer to my goal of publishing stories and maybe even making a living off my writing. I want to do better at this than I did in 2020.

Promote my work. I’m a terrible promoter or my own work because I don’t care to talk about myself. This year I want to promote my work better. I’m not sure how I intend to do that, but it will start here with some love and care on my website. My plan for now is to spend the first few months of 2021 trying to figure out how to build a platform and get news of my books and stories out there. I’ll then decide what to do from there. Any advice? Please leave a comment or drop me an email through my contact page.

Nurture my collaboration. I am very excited about my current writing project, which is a collaboration on a YA fantasy novel about progressive rock music and the end times. Last year, a long-time friend of mine told me about a “crazy” story idea he had. I thought the idea was fantastic, so I proposed we work on it together. Several months later, we have a solid book outline, and we’ve started to put words to paper (or computer, as the case may be). I’ve never collaborated on fiction before, so this has been a scary and exciting project, and so far, I love it. I’ll talk more about this collaborative process in some future posts.

Take care of myself. 2020 was a hard year for many reason—my life has changed a lot in the last two years. Fortunately most of those changes should eventually result in good things, but there is still a long road to travel before I get there. I need to remember to take care of myself and my family because we area all in this together.