This year is shaping up to be one of my most complicated yet! It’s the first year I’ve started unemployed… ever! At least, since being employed was a requirement to buy food/pay rent. Survival is definitely on the mind, which makes this year perhaps slightly less fun looking but in ways I’m ready for. I think. I hope!
- Make rent with my business by the end of the year. While I’m ambitious and hopeful about building my solo consulting and education business, I want to be realistic. So if I can end this year at the very least making enough from my consulting/teaching freelance work to pay rent each month, I’ll be tremendously proud! For context, rent is $1,189.00/month (not counting utilities).
- Finish first draft of Headwaters. A book I started plotting last January that might be one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. Except for how hard it is to get all the way out of my brain. I want to at least complete a draft this year, and I’m thinking the UCLA Extension Romance Novel Writing class I decided to take this winter/spring will be helpful here!
- Full revision draft of Good Deal. Another book that, at its core, is so special to me, but whose first draft is a damn mess. I meant to do this last year, and I did make some progress, but several other projects (including my co-written feature, the books above and below in this list, and starting a business) allowed me to procrastinate. But no more! This is my only book (so far) with a canonically asexual lead character, I should have a real draft!!
- Revise & explore self-publishing options for Rehabbing The Billionaire. This was my NaNoWriMo 2023 project, which I finished the first draft of just under the wire of the year. It’s wildly unlike anything I’ve written before, because I designed it in a lab (my brain) to be a fit for Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited self-pub community. It’s tropey, shorter and less complex narratively, and extremely horny. I don’t want to commit to self-publishing if it turns out to be the wrong direction for me professionally and creatively, but I want to prepare this book as if I were self-publishing it, and get serious about looking into exactly what that may entail.
- Win NaNoWriMo 2024. Because I’ve got so many active projects, I don’t have a new story idea… yet. But I’ve LOVED participating in NaNoWriMo again for the first time in years, and I want to commit to it early! It’ll be my fifth official time doing it (though I unofficially wrote 50k in a month April and July of 2022 as well) and, hopefully, my fifth time winning it.
- Read 20 new authors. I have a Goodreads goal (200 books, because I wanna not put too much pressure on myself but I’ve already read 8 and last year I read 435 so. We’ll see) but I don’t just want to read, I want to read more broadly. I particularly want to make an effort to seek out authors of color and more queer love stories, because my favorite reads of 2023 were very white and straight for the most part, and that’s because I was mostly finding authors from authors I’d already read, and since I started from mostly white authors… you can see how this happened. I have a romance newsletter– I should be reading more broadly anyways!
- Successfully propagate a succulent. I love my little windowsill succulent garden, but some of them have grown weirdly because of access to sunlight and my halfhearted attempts to keep them healthy, so I’ve done some propagation research and between that and some pots without plants currently inside them, I’m hoping to trim back and regrow some of my more unwieldy plant children.
- Order in less than twice a week, consistently. Look, some weeks are tougher than others. But now that my income has been dramatically cut back and in the next two years Quinn and I want to try for a house/a permanent homestead to start trying to have a family, so for health AND financial reasons, I gotta stop letting laziness get in the way of good decision-making.
- Find reasons to leave the city/state at least twice a season. Day trips are fun! Traveling with my husband is fun! Seeing friends/family who don’t live near us is fun! We both (currently) work remotely, it’s easier than ever to pick up and wander off for a week or two to a more interesting locale. Plus, we always have a good time.
- Incorporate physical activity into my new self-employed weekly routine. There’s no excuse! And yet, every year, I sit on my butt. I’ve already incorporated stretching and it shames me to admit that I already feel better. Whoops.
As always… what are yours? Let’s keep each other accountable!
