Some New Year's resolutions
These are some of the things I want to accomplish this year. I've found that it's easier to keep New Year's resolutions if you can express them as a specific goal, and if you have some objective way of deciding whether you've reached the goal or how much progress you've made towards it. It also helps if you can break down a big goal into smaller things that you can do every day or every week.
The main one is to finish writing Dust & Water, volume III in the Barefoot Healer series, and have it on sale by the end of the year. I want to have the first draft done by 30th June, so I've set myself a target of writing 5,000 words a week. This is a big increase on my old target of 3,500 words a week, and I'm a bit nervous about keeping to it, but we'll see how it goes...
I also want to finish a short story. Over the Christmas break, I wrote about 7,000 words of the story about dragons. (It doesn't have a title yet - I'm hopeless at them.) It's not finished yet, but I've discovered that my dragons like purple and they measure heights by singing.
I aim to read 15 books this year, and I'm using the Goodreads reading challenge to keep myself honest. When I get going, I'm quite a fast reader, and I could probably read 15 books in about 3 weeks if I had nothing else to do in my spare time... but writing 5,000 words a week isn't going to leave me much spare time.
And a few non-writing ones...
Visit Dublin with Breda. In all the times I've been to Ireland, I've never been to its capital. (Though I did pass through the airport once, on the way to somewhere else.)
I'd like to become better at photography. Theoretically, I know what all the controls on my camera do, but I usually can't answer questions like, "If I change this setting, how will that affect the picture?" or "How do I fix this problem with this picture?"
Migrate my main desktop computer to the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Linux (or somebody's 64-bit Linux, anyway). Currently it's 32-bit 10.04 (Lucid), and it's rather annoying that I can only access about half the RAM I've paid for.
Give blood at least once. I got back to it last year after a long absence, and the next two sessions were both on weekends when I was out of town. D'oh...
That's enough to be going on with. Come back in twelve months to see how I fared :-)
The main one is to finish writing Dust & Water, volume III in the Barefoot Healer series, and have it on sale by the end of the year. I want to have the first draft done by 30th June, so I've set myself a target of writing 5,000 words a week. This is a big increase on my old target of 3,500 words a week, and I'm a bit nervous about keeping to it, but we'll see how it goes...
I also want to finish a short story. Over the Christmas break, I wrote about 7,000 words of the story about dragons. (It doesn't have a title yet - I'm hopeless at them.) It's not finished yet, but I've discovered that my dragons like purple and they measure heights by singing.
I aim to read 15 books this year, and I'm using the Goodreads reading challenge to keep myself honest. When I get going, I'm quite a fast reader, and I could probably read 15 books in about 3 weeks if I had nothing else to do in my spare time... but writing 5,000 words a week isn't going to leave me much spare time.
And a few non-writing ones...
Visit Dublin with Breda. In all the times I've been to Ireland, I've never been to its capital. (Though I did pass through the airport once, on the way to somewhere else.)
I'd like to become better at photography. Theoretically, I know what all the controls on my camera do, but I usually can't answer questions like, "If I change this setting, how will that affect the picture?" or "How do I fix this problem with this picture?"
Migrate my main desktop computer to the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Linux (or somebody's 64-bit Linux, anyway). Currently it's 32-bit 10.04 (Lucid), and it's rather annoying that I can only access about half the RAM I've paid for.
Give blood at least once. I got back to it last year after a long absence, and the next two sessions were both on weekends when I was out of town. D'oh...
That's enough to be going on with. Come back in twelve months to see how I fared :-)
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