My Goals for December

As I do every month, I'm documenting my goals for the month of December here. Thursday I'll review my progress for November. As I mentioned yesterday, it's not going to be the most impressive set of results.

But for today, I'm looking forward. My December goals are:

1) Keep my Daily Writing Chain going. - This goal shows up every month.
2) Write and submit four new stories. - I'm doing a mini-Write 1/Sub 1 weekly like I did last December. My goal will be to have a new story out the door every Friday in December.
3) Revise and submit one story from my backlog. - Still chipping away at the backlog.
4) Finalize my 2013 goals. - Rather straightforward.

You'll notice this is a very pared-down goal list compared to some from prior months. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that since I've been struggling a bit to reach some of my goals, I want to make sure that I'm focusing on the things which are of the highest priority to me. Right now, my writing identity (both in terms of how I believe other writers/readers see me and my own internal writing identity) is that of a short fiction writer, mostly in the science fiction and fantasy genres. All of the goals above either help me reinforce that identity or relate to defining future goals, which makes them valuable in my mind.

I'm hoping that I can have a solid 4-for-4 performance on these goals. While I'm perfectly fine with not reaching all of my goals every month and with giving myself some slack, I think it's time to rein things in a bit and go for a clear "win" of a month.

Wish me luck!