Category: Goals

Goals tracking! There are three major goals I’m tracking this year for both personal and business improvement. Comment below with your goals and how you did this week.

1k words/workday:

Monday: 2.5k – Re-plotted Fated
Tuesday: 1300
Wednesday: 0 – Appointment Day
Thursday: 1056
Friday:

Notes: This week had some upheaval on Wednesday. I had a 3 hour hair appointment to lighten, dye, and get a cut. One of the most impactful side effects of my autism is a limited tolerance for public settings and a very long recovery period following an outing like this. The bigger, longer, or later the event, the more time I require to recover from it. Therefore, a 3 hour hair appointment (arguably doing nothing but sitting in a chair) turns into an entire afternoon and evening of rest, a full night’s sleep, and a nap the following day. (still got the 1k on Thursday, though!) I do my best to recognize when an outing is going to drain me and deliberately make plans after to read a good book and wear my noise-canceling headphones to reduce input. All of that allowed me to bounce back on Thursday quite well. Needing only a nap is a great result.

I went to a Nascar race once. 2 hr drive there, 5 hrs of race cars (with headphones and ear plugs), 2 hr drive home. I spent the next three days asleep except to eat a single meal. Honoring the rest I require has been a very hard lesson to learn.

Next week will be a 0 words week while I travel to Colorado and attend a conference!

10k steps/day

Monday: 9935 – So close!
Tuesday: 8793
Wednesday: 10,070 – 2nd 10k of the year!
Thursday: 9610
Friday:
Saturday:
Sunday:

Notes: The step goal is in the mid 8k’s now, which means I’m brushing up against 10k on days with an errand to run or an extra walk around the park. I’ve found that I can use the stepper while I knit or crochet and watch a video, which is great when I realize I’m 2k short around dinner time.

I’m curious to see how my effort changes once the weather is nice enough to go running again. This week I’m in Colorado with plans to go hiking and with a lot of walking expected at my conference. I don’t think these step goals will be hard to hit!

1 completed line art/week

Notes: I had one idea, then another idea, then a slightly different idea–things were all over the place this week.

Goals tracking! There are three major goals I’m tracking this year for both personal and business improvement. Comment below with your goals and how you did this week.

1k words/workday:

Monday: 1000
Tuesday: 1374
Wednesday: 400
Thursday: Put Hellhounds through PWA, +~400 words
Friday: Break

Notes: I finished a short story this week! That’s Princess Hellhound, To You was written specifically for an urban fantasy anthology call by an editor friend of mine. I’ve submitted that story and now everyone cross their fingers! Hopefully she buys it! Monday I’ll be getting back to my PNR novel Fated To The Wolf, which will be serialized here for members first.

10k steps/day

Monday: 6239 – below goal
Tuesday: 7203
Wednesday: 7384
Thursday: 7432
Friday: 7936
Saturday: 7852
Sunday: 7731

Notes: Monday wasn’t a surprise. I had a 9k day last Sunday and Monday I was tired! 6k is still much better than previous tired days, though, and it’s great to see progress. The rest of the week went very well. I’m getting better at front-loading my morning with at least a third of the steps I’ll need for a 10k day. And the weather has finally warmed up enough that some of these steps are outdoors now!

1 completed line art/week

Notes: I’ve realized that I need to post the art here even if it’s incomplete, in order to keep myself from going “well, I’m not going to finish it, so it’s fine if I don’t work on it” No. All progress gets posted from this week forward. I’ll go back and post the incomplete art from last week, too.

Last week I started something heavy on the scale patterns and I wasn’t too pleased with the design of it. So this week I went heavy on the scale patterns with a different style. I like this style more, but I’m still not thrilled. More exploring to do.

Goals tracking! There are three major goals I’m tracking this year for both personal and business improvement. Comment below with your goals and how you did this week.

1k words/workday:

Monday: National Holiday
Tuesday: 1537
Wednesday: 985
Thursday: 1058
Friday: 1500

Notes: How did I miss the goal on Wed by 15 words! I must have come to the end of a scene…. Well overwriting on Tuesday and Friday certainly made up for it. Friday marks the start of a new dictation experiment, the goal of which is to get comfortable with dictation. That’s it. It’s very weird to transition from fingers to speaking.

10k steps/day

Monday: 6317
Tuesday: 6590
Wednesday: 6873
Thursday: 7059
Friday: 6838
Saturday: 6888
Sunday: 9114

Notes: The auto-goal set by my watch is still hovering below 7k, but not for long, now. And it turns out, I pace when I dictate, so the above dictation experiment may actually improve this step goal at the same time! Friday was a surprise! I felt very tired for most of the day (turns out I’m having a reaction to some food, fatigue and back pain are always the first symptoms) but I went for a walk around the park with Mr V for the first time in probably two months (the cold and I do not agree) and ended up blowing past my mid-6k goal and nearly hit 10 without trying. It has bumped the goal for this week up over 7k/day. Woo!

1 completed line art/week

Notes: Week 3 and all of a sudden I don’t know what to draw for the week. It took almost two months for me to get to that point with writing a short story/week. So this week’s drawing is not complete, but I did spend many hours on it. The holiday on monday screwed up my time perception and I didn’t even start working until wednesday or thursday because I forgot all about it. Lots of weekend time instead of spacing it out. Lots of initial sketching that got wiped out to try something else. For sure a milestone in this practice. A reach for the moon and fall among the stars situation. The piece isn’t done but it exists and it wouldn’t have otherwise.

Like the christmas tree from week one, if I have time and energy in the future, I’ll come back to this one and wrap it up.

Are they new year’s resolutions if you start them again in July? Asking for a friend.

This year I wanted to focus on goals that are production-specific, rather than end-result specific. If you’ve ever had a desk job you’ve probably hear someone drone on for 3 hours during a presentation about SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, and I fell asleep after that. On the one hand, you get out of work for a few hours, but on the other, the topic is so boring it puts half the attendees to sleep. Worth it? Maybe if you need a nap.

I’m not here to talk about SMART goals. They’re good, but I need something a little more refined. I don’t have a fancy acronym for what I do, it’s just something I’ve come to understand about how I work: the end goal doesn’t motivate me. Thinking about all the books I will have written takes all the wind out of my sails. Because why aren’t they written now?

No, instead, the goals I make for myself, and you’re welcome to blame the ADHD on this, are limited to daily or, at most, weekly milestones. And the weekly ones are at risk of falling apart, TBH, unless I have accountability! The worst enemy of any goal I set is not being unwilling to do the work, it’s the fact that by the time I get to Wednesday I’ve forgotten all about it. Where are my no-object-permanence people at? High-five. We’re besties now.

So what are the goals for this year? I’m so glad you asked:

Write 1k words/workday – that’s Monday-Friday unless a federal holiday sends Mr V home early! In 2022 I wrote 50k words. In 2023 I wrote 100k. If I can do 1k/day this year I’ll be OVER 200k words. Can you imagine? That’s at least 3 novels. My best words year was way back in 2014, before my health took a nose-dive. I wrote a serial story on my blog with a chapter posted every week. I want to do that again.

Walk 10k steps/day – right now I average about 4k and that’s just not enough! I recently bought a stepper, though, and it’s helping me bump those rookie numbers up on days when the high is 27F and it’s just too cold to leave the house for anything other than a tea-emergency.

Complete an art piece 1/week – long time fans will recognize this challenge. Back in 2019 I challenged myself to write a short story 1/week. And I did it! That’s how I started publishing every single month. And since then, I’ve been writing and getting short stories published in all kinds of magazines. This year I want to do the same thing with art, and I’ll be sharing those results here on the blog. You all get to be my accountability group <3

About that. I work on goals best when I can tell someone about them, even if that someone is screaming into the void of the Internet. As long as the void spits back a gold star now and then, I’m happy.

So let’s be each-other’s void.

(This metaphor got out of hand immediately. Don’t try and fix it, just back away slowly and hopefully it won’t bite.)

Tell me what your goals are! Post down below with projects you’ve been thinking about, targets you want to hit, stars you want to fall amongst. Make ‘em SMART if that works for you (Achievable! Realistic! Time-Based! See, that meeting wasn’t a waste, I remember things), or tell me what little steps you want to take every day/week to look back on later.

Then, every Monday, I’ll tell you all about my goals the past week. Did I hit 1k words, 10k steps, and finish a new piece of art? You’ll have to find out on Monday because, uh, today is Thursday and the answer is not yet! And in the comments, you can tell me all about your progress. Are you going for those runs so you can do a 10k? Are you knitting and purling? Are you baking new things? Planting new flowers? Teaching the dog new tricks? (PLEASE tell me all about the new dog tricks) I want to hear all about it.

But more importantly, I want to hear about the setbacks. What kept you from your goal that week? Because I’m sure we can figure out ways to overcome together. Bonus points for restarting after a major event, like a new baby! Life is super disruptive and we’ve got to make room for our goals or they’ll get run right over.