This was supposed to be my quarterly check-in. I found it in my drafts folder today. Oops!
I am usually a stickler for having these types of posts go up on the last day of the period they refer to or the first day of the following period, but here we are. 😂
This year was to be the year of completing things. You can see my original January 01 Goals List here. How’s that all going? Ehh… reasonably, I guess. As 2020 certainly proved, I aim high and certainly can’t account for the times when my head is simply not in the game.
But one thing I am determined to do is shift my mindset to focus on what I do achieve, rather than what I don’t. I’m not going to list every goal I originally posted here, and tell you how I’m going with it.
Instead, I’m going to talk about what I have achieved so far this year.
Goal: draft two Drosselmeier Industries sequels
I finished the first draft of the first sequel in February, which seems a long time ago now. I recently reopened the file one day while I was bored at work and found myself immediately making some notes about how to improve it for the next draft. I’m not sure when I might get to it but not that I’ve got it back at the forefront of my mind a little, I do want to revisit it sooner rather than later.
I will admit that multiple drafts of one sequel is more likely than drafts of two sequels at this stage. That’s okay. I’d love to have it ready for around a February 2022 release, which would follow on nicely from a Christmas round of promotion for Operation: Sugarplum. We’ll see.
Goal: complete two projects from the incomplete WIPs list
In March and April I completed the first draft of a novella called Lucy Williams Is A Witch. It was the result of an idea that I had kind of sketched out and had on that list. It’s no longer a romance, and no longer set at Christmas, and it’s YA rather than adult… but I’m still counting this as finishing an incomplete WIP. I’d only ever got as far as vaguely outlining my “Witchy Christmas novella” anyway, so it still counts.
I’m working on the second draft now and can see at least third and fourth drafts on the horizon.
Goal: Relaunch A More Complicated Fairytale
I keep getting distracted from this goal. My plan was to spend the rest of April getting this formatted, but I ended up doing more editing on it. And I only did a few chapters before life got the best of me, and I haven’t returned. This is why these check-in posts are so useful for me, even if no one else ever reads them! To be honest, this hadn’t been at the forefront of my mind at all!
Goal: post at least two writing-related posts on Instagram each month.
I’ve been doing decently at this! I started the year posting regularly on both the #SnippetSaturday and #WriterWednesday tags. The Wednesday posts have fallen off a bit, but I’ve done pretty well at sticking with weekly Saturday posts.
I would love to be able to increase engagement on my writing posts and so I’m poking around in other hashtags as well to see if they might be more useful.
Goal: Re-work newsletter onboarding sequence and keep up with monthly newsletters
I’ve been keeping up with the newsletters, but still need to do more work with growing my list. Lately I’ve been commissioning artists on Twitter to do illustrations of my Lucy Williams characters and sharing them in my newsletters. Closer to publication time, I will share them on this here blog, too.
To be honest, newsletter time tends to surprise me each month. I know that to grow my list I need to get the links out there in the backs of my books and things like that, too. I’ve got to set some time aside to really focus on that.
Goal: learn to tap dance
I started classes in mid-February. The first four weeks were a foundation course for those who had never tapped before. Now that I’m in the Beginners course, it’s a bit more challenging and I would even go as far as to say I am not always enjoying it, but I shall persevere and improve!
So that’s where I am now. How are you doing with your goals for this week/month/year?
Emily Wrayburn 