Goals

Or, in honour of Euro Cup, GOOOOOOAAAAAALS!

Ahem. The half-year mark is a good time to look at the resolutions you set back in January. It's important not only to take stock of the work you've done so far but to also evaluate the goals themselves and see whether they're even still relevant to you.

For 2012 I made a simple, straightforward goal: each month I would submit a new story to Woman's World magazine. Woman's World is a weekly woman's magazine sold throughout North America. Each issue they publish one mystery story and one romance story.  I've had some success selling stories to them, and I wanted to build on that.

So, in the first week of January I sent off a mystery. Right on track! In February I mailed them a romance. Good job Shannon! In March...I did a lot of things in March, but subbing a story to Woman's World was not one of them. Same deal for April. It was only in May that I got back on it and sent them a mystery story. Tomorrow I plan to mail them a romance story, filling my quota for June.

So, for the first half of 2012, I'm batting an average of 4/6 when it comes to following through on my resolutions. Not the best track record. Could be worse. Either way I'm still committed to doing better. But were those even the right goals for me?




Looking at my goals now, I think I went too easy on myself. That may sound ironic seeing as I couldn't even follow through on my 'easy' goals, but I'm taking the chance now, at this half-year mark, to set the bar higher. For over a year I've been taking part in Write 1 Sub 1. W1S1 is largely what you make it to be: You challenge yourself to write one story a week, or one story a month, and then send that brand new story out into the world. I'm doing the monthly challenge. Even in the months where I didn't send a story to WW I was still writing, and even in the months where I did send WW a story I was still submitting other stories to fantasy, horror, sci-fi and traditional mystery markets. For a long time I've unofficially been doing two stories a month, but now I'm going to make it official. In addition to my WW goals I will also write another story each month and submit it to the appropriate markets. 

So those are my new and improved goals for 2012. I also need to start writing every day, but that's a whole other blog post.