2019 Working Goals Review

Pretty pleased with myself in my writerly life (not discussing the other, considerably less pleased partitions of existence). I met nearly all my writerly goals this year. Not going to diss myself for not reading two novels a month given the number of novellas I read, but I am going to try to increase my reading in 2020.

Read 100 short stories, 16 novels, 11 novellas and change (various other works).

I *am* concerned that I utterly failed at my focused skill-building; not only did I NOT identify and practice a skill from each novel read, I only logged 24 skill-building sessions for the entire year!  I did do a lot of untracked revision skill-building in November during my spontaneous  personal "revision and submission" NaNo this year so I might try a tracked skill-building month early in 2020 to get the habit started. Maybe follow it with a revision-and-submission month so I keep those skills alive; that push was startlingly useful. I tripled my submission speed. A month on and I'm already slowing down as I revise.

The goals I met were:

• -X- A Deep but Modest Apiquai revisions honed by April 15 (finished June 30)
• -X- Track short stories read (aim for 13/mo)
• -X- Budget for and plan classes/experiences based on weaknesses
• -X- A Deep but Modest Apiquai on submission to 25 agents by Summer Solstice (took me until Sept 27)
• -X!- (work up to) 13 ss on submission by the 13th/ea month by W. Solstice
• -X- Writing Retreat this summer