Thursday, September 5, 2013

September Goals

Let's keep this short and sweet for the goals.
  1. Write at least 250 words each day.
  2. Finish and submit a short story.
  3. Critique at least 6 stories.
  4. Write NaNoWriMo newsletter articles.
  5. Revise 1 short story for critique.
I'm going to write about about why, in the hopes that writing my thoughts down will help keep me on track to accomplishing the goals.

The first one is pretty obvious.  I've got a good streak going so far (approaching 100 days), and I'd like to keep it going.  I've been using the Magic Spreadsheet, which has been good, but I may need to cut back on the whole level-up idea due to the number of extra words it adds to my "should do" list.  I'm not sure I need that pressure.

The second is because, while I've been "finishing" short stories for a while, they sit in various states of editing, and I never mark it as done enough to send it off for submission (recently, anyway; at one point in my college career I was submitting some stuff that should never have left my computer, as well as one piece I'm still proud of).  I need to get on the ball for submissions, or decide that I'm not really in it for publication, which is entirely wrong.  I'm just scared of negative feedback at this point, which is a phase I'm pretty sure every author goes through.  In fact, according to some, they never get over it.

The third is to keep up the goodwill I think I've developed among some critiquing communities.  I hope this goodwill allows me to get good critiques of my own stories when I submit them.

The NaNoWriMo newsletters is a task I took on very early this year.  I've got some of it in hand, but I need to write my own articles for the newsletters to help out.  In fact, I need to poke a few others who might write as well.

Finally, I want to keep the critique pipeline going.  In fact, I think that should be one of my big goals this weekend: start editing my next short story for critique.

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