ROW80 – New Round, New Goals

It’s time for another Round of Words in 80 Days. In case you don’t know what ROW80 is, go click that link and check out the website. Basically, I’m setting overall goals for this last quarter of the year, and then I’ll do weekly goals posts in which I’ll tell you what I did and where I’m headed pertaining to my goals.

This quarter I’ve set some pretty simple goals. I’m trying to take it easy on myself since I tend to try to do too much. I’ll be separating it into three categories of my life: Writing, Design, and Personal. In some ways, they’ll overlap. In others, not so much.

Writing

For this quarter, I’m diving into self-publishing. I’ve dabbled with it for a pen name and I think I’m to the point where I know what I’m doing and ready to try it with this name. So, the goals:

Finish the hockey romance, Off Her Game, and submit that to the requested places.
Write To Score His Heart, hockey romance #2.
Edit and publish the Christmas novella by late October.
Write zero draft of the untitled fantasy bounty hunter story.
Plan writing/publishing schedule for the Spring/Summer 2013 season.

Design

For those that may not know (because the blog has picked up quite a few new followers in the last few weeks, I run a graphic design business, Soaring Phoenix Media. I focus on authors, because since I am one, I know the target audience and what authors need in general from their graphic work. Plus, I just really enjoy it.

So goals…

Continue to work on school design projects. I’m in the home stretch. I have three quarters left.
Line up projects for 2013. (So, like, if you need some graphic work done… I have some openings…)
I really want to stretch my knowledge and improve my skills so I’ve bought some digital art and Photoshop books. My plan is to read one book or work from one book every two months.
Create a stockpile of pre-made covers to offer on the website in the future. I actually have about 20 right now, but I’m really looking to expand that to 80 before offering them for sale on the website. I like having buffers.

Personal

Continue to blog every day for the 365 Days to Life series, because that’s really fun and it’s doing what I’ve needed it to do.
Increase my income 15% to put me on the path to a new, better quality of life.
Stick to the Total Money Makeover plan and get an emergency fund set aside before the end of the year.

I’ll break it down on Wednesday into weekly goals. I may not update the personal aspect as much, since I’m doing daily blog posts already about my personal life. I do want to talk about my design stuff more. I toyed with blogging on my design site, but really, I like having only one blog. It makes me happy that I don’t have to try to remember to update elsewhere. So I’m thinking in the next website overhaul I do, I will try to integrate the two better so they appear more cohesive. But that’s a project for next year…

And that is what I got today. How are your goals shaping up?