End of a Blogfest and Goals

Woo Hoo! Happy Friday, everyone!

It's the last day of the Buccaneer Blogfest marathon hosted by Sharon Bayliss and Courtney Young.

Today's post is about reflecting on this month-long experience and talk about where I go from here. So, this is the perfect opportunity to talk about my goals - from July, and for August.

First, reflection time.

A month-long blogfest is always tough - I've done a couple and it requires a lot of time and committment. Not much else gets done, really. But the benefits! I've met tons of cool people - writers like me - in all different phases of their careers; beginners, contracted but not yet published, and published authors.

I could have done better at visiting, of course, but it's an all-day event to get to everybody. I think I visited everyone - hard to tell because I skipped around a lot.

What I learned most about is social media. We're all doing it with our blogs, of course, but interacting on FaceBook is quicker and more informal. I had a few author friends on Facebook before the start of this blogfest, but now I have dozens. And I'm loving it so much. It's a fun and informal way to get to know everyone. And lots of notifications of awesome deals. I'm talking notices of FREE books and other FREE swag. It's so cool!

Not so cool is my understanding of Twitter, which I just started for this blogfest. I do all right with clicking the button and sharing a tweet and I managed to get it linked to my FaceBook page. Ah well, I'll get there.


Now for July results!Goal or No Goal? Write a synopsis of a novela idea I had during BuNo which involves some different sort of characters in a different sort of world. Intrigued? Good! Hmmm, does copying and pasting a section from my BuNo writing efforts count? No? Okay - No Goal. Complete 150 pages of final (hopefully) edits on Givin' Up The Ghost. Yes - and No. I did complete 150 pages of edits, but I'm thinking I need to go back again....No Goal? Paste together A Guilty Ghost Surprised. This is what I wrote during BuNoWriMo, but I zipped through the outline and ended up writing a bunch of separate scenes that now need to be added. Not a small job, as I have to now figure out where the buggers go! Yes I did this, but have yet to go through and make sure they are actually in the right order. But I'm calling this a GOAL!Read three books. Why yes, yes I did do this - definitively and without any qualifiers: Urchin King by Katharina Gerlach, On a Hot August Afternoon by Bridget Straub, and End of Days by Roland Yeomans. GOALPlatform build for my new blog. And yes, I did this as well, all month long. GOAL! Contact 50 followers from my old blog and invite them to re-follow me on my new blog. Um, sort of, hehe. I went through 50 names on my Follower list and retrieved email addresses - if there was one. I think I ended up with about 15 in the end. I emailed each one separately and invited them to follow me on my new blog. Didn't hear from any of them. Is that a No Goal? Visit 25 awesome blogs per week. Since I participated in a month-long blogfest, of course I reached this GOAL!So I've had some hits and misses *sigh*.

And now to setting August goals:

Work on final final edits of Givin' Up The GhostWork on scheduling blog tour for GUTG self-publish releaseWork on marketing plan for GUTGWork on posts for the blog tourWork on synopsis (for real this time) for BuNoWriMo idea, keeping in mind that 19th century ghostly madam's have no place in an MG novel:)Read 3 booksVisit 20 awesome blogs per weekIn my spare time *winks* work on 2nd draft of A Guilty Ghost SurprisedAnd I hope to be able to announce a partner in crime on my book release blog tour very soon!
How was your July? What are your goals for August?