Two Story Sales and More Goal Updates

I ended 2012 with two more short story sales. My story "Act of Penance" was accepted for the December 2012 Kazka Press Flash Fiction contest. I'm very pleased to have had one more story accepted there before I take over the editorial reins for the monthly contests. This story should go live today or in the very near future.

Also, "Back to School", my zombie teacher story, has been accepted for publication by Plasma Frequency. It will be in the fourth issue of that publication, due in early February.

Now to close out December's goals and declare goals for January.

For December...

1. Keep my Daily Writing Chain going. - I did okay with this until hitting illness and holidays. Also, I've made the decision to try temporarily going without the chain. Now that the first of the year has come and gone, I'll really end up seeing whether I have the inherent discipline to keep moving forward without the chain as a guide. 
2. Write and submit four new stories. - Done. 
3. Revise and submit one story from my backlog. - This was partially done. I revised a story and felt fairly good about it, but a beta reader felt it needed more work and I haven't yet figured out exactly where I'm going to take the story. Rather than submit it as-is, I let this one pass by.
4. Finalize my 2013 goals. - Done.

Not the ambiguous 4-for-4 month I had hoped for, but a good month all the same.

Now to look forward to January.

1. Submit four stories for the first time. - Doing this would get me 1/9th of the way toward my goal of 36 for the year. This both positions me to be ahead of schedule and allows more time for working on novelettes and novellas later in the year.
2. Read fifty short stories. - This gets me 1/10th of the way to my goal of 500.
3. Submit programming interest form for Marcon. - Marcon is a local science fiction convention held in late March. I'd like to be on several panels if they have a place for me, and this form is due by January 15th.
4. Publish a revised blog strategy. - I've talked about wanting to revise my blogging schedule and I've already announced that the Write Every Day blog will no longer have new content regularly added. 
5. Reply to all Kazka Press flash fiction submissions by the 25th. - This is five days after the close of submissions.
6. Have some point during the month where all of my stories which I consider to be on submission are out the door to a market. - I'm still not doing as good of a job of keeping stories circulating as I was in early 2012. But as long as once a month I ensure everything is out, I should be in fairly good shape.

That's a fairly sizable list of goals. I'll be very pleased with my January results if I manage to complete all of them.