Nice! Taking a break now and again is so very important!
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Good luck on that! I hope you reach your goals!
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OOF, I went through a 10 year writing drought, so I feel you on that first one!
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It is! My last release was such an exhausting and hectic experience and threw all my other writing out of whack so I really need a break lol
It’s definitely been trying 
But I feel like if I was there once, I can do it again. Got 360-ish days to do it! XD
Nice!
Thanks! All the best to you, too!
I’ve been struggling with the start of act two for about a month now. And to think I wrote all of Act One in a month.
Thank you, still picking at this most recent chapter.
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Well, hope you can get it done soon!
After taking some time to think about it, I’ve finally set my goal for 2022 and it’s: INCREMENTAL GOALS.
I’ll set myself a bite-sized, achievable goal and try to reach it. Once it’s done, I’ll set another goal.
I think this will help me especially with the big projects. I like goals, they keep me motivated and push me forward. Deadlines force me to get a move on, even if I only have to answer to myself and that’s because I’m my harshest critic. If I satisfy this critic, I feel very accomplished. 
But the big projects take a very long time to finish and when I’m working on something for months and months, I burn out. If I have a small goal, I think it will be easier to keep my inner critic happy and keep on moving forward. Progress is my goal!
And so today, I’ve set my first official goal for this year and it’s to finish one of my WIPs before ONC begins (likely February 1st though I won’t keep myself accountable to exactly the first - a few days here or there is not a big deal. The ending result is the big deal here). It’s a novella that’s half-written and fully planned out so I think it’s doable.
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I don’t like to put goals relating to stuff I can’t control (such as accolades, reads, etc, although I do hope for such things), but these are my current goals:
- Revise/Edit SLB into something I feel may actually be queryable (I’m not sure I actually will though. I will decide what to do with it once I’ve revised. I may also put the revised version up as a new story and enter into the Wattys).
- Finish the last part of my fanfiction trilogy. I know this won’t bring me any glory, or even many comments, but this was the first story I ever wrote and I need to finish it.
- Enter and finish the ONC once again (I desperately hope to do better than last year, but I won’t make that a goal since I have no control over it).
- Enter something into the Wattys once again. (Probably Sweet Tea, and perhaps also the revised version of SLB)
And I think that’s it!
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Smaller achievable goals is a much better way to manage it I agree! I can’t give myself huge goals as I get discouraged when other things eat my time.
It’s good to hear that you’ve got so much already in your pocket for the first goal.
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Going for things that you CAN control is laudable and less stress inducing than trying for things you can’t control. All the best on your goals!
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Definitely.
You know, this is the third year I’m doing goals and I think I’ve stumbled upon a great method for writing goals. And that is - adjust your method to your needs at the time.
In 2020, I wanted to push myself to write regularly. I wanted to write 10,000 every month. And so I counted everything. I ended up writing over 200k that year. I proved to myself that I can write a lot. That’s not my problem and counting words is a time-consuming chore, so next year, I readjusted my approach.
By the end of 2020, I had a lot of ongoing projects which despite writing a ton, I still didn’t finish. And I realized that my biggest problem was that I switched between projects too much and my mind was in chaos. So my 2021 goal was focus. Each month, I decided what I would work on and I worked only on that for the entire month. It helped my issue definitely. I’ve learned more about my writing needs, strengths and weaknesses.
In 2022, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. But then the last few days had become chaotic, my mind is yet again on multiple projects at the same time and there’s different type of work to be done on each. I can’t set one general goal that will work for each of them. And so I realized that I needed to set different goals for each project and making them bite-sized will take away the dread from the daunting goal: finish this project.
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Yeah, This would drive me a bit crazy. It’s bad enough that I want my chapters to be greater than 2800 words, trying to write 10K a month would really push me over the edge.
On this one, I’m a multiple project kind of person. I need to have something in the wings in order to keep from stopping writing completely. So yeah, I have to be okay with just having those unfinished projects, because I can’t force myself to write. If I do the result is crap. I think I’m undiagnosed ADD to be honest, so my attention wanders. So having multiple projects is beneficial to keep me in the realm of writing.
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I get that.
You know, I tried an experiment few months ago to work on two projects at the same time.
There was the project A - the one I was supposed to be working on, though I had been working on it for many months and felt burned out.
And there was the project B - the fun one.
The goal was to write a bit for project A and then reward myself with project B. Rinse and repeat.
What ended up happening was some cool reverse psychology because whenever I was supposed to work on one thing, I didn’t feel like it, and so I’d procrastinate by working on the other project. In the end, I made good progress and didn’t feel burnt out.
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I like that! Glad that worked out for you!
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Basically for anything and everything really, but yeah mostly to get a story I have wrote! I want to complete at least two books this year, and I am hoping that pushes me to finish something else <3
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Yeah turning those brain worms into workable plots is sometimes a trick! All the best for getting it made into a story.
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Thank you! Actually the one I am working on is going pretty smoothly for now, knock on wood. We’ll see what happens once I get farther into the plotline 