Resolutions, Resolutions

I no longer make New Year resolutions because I rarely kept them.

Instead, I decide on goals for the coming year and create a simple plan to achieve them. I don’t always reach my goals, but I do make real progress and have more success with goals than I ever had with resolutions.

I’ll spare you the sharing of my personal goals. But I will fling out my writing goals. We can check back next December to see how well I did. Here goes.

2013 Craft goal: Improve my self-editing skills.

My plan to achieve this goal is threefold: take an editing workshop, spend time each week with the Chicago Manual of Style, and read (or listen to) one book each month on writing and editing. I will conscientiously apply what I learn to my work.

2013 Business Goal: Raise my daily word count production to 2000 words.

My plan to achieve this goal is something I call the Ten Percent Solution (a hybrid of Tom Connellan’s 1% Solution and NaNoWriMo). I will begin each month by writing as much as I comfortably can that day and then add 10 percent to that count the next day. I will continue to add 10 percent to each previous day’s count until I am writing 2000 words a day. I will record my progress daily and I will report my total monthly word count at my chapter meetings.

So there are my 2013 writing goals. What goals do you have for the New Year?