Keeping it short for a year-long worth of dreaming. (Big Dreams Blog Update #15)

It’s New Years’ Eve! See that obligatory fireworks image.

-wipes tears-

And it feels like only yesterday—

Actually I sorta felt all of 2014 go by, because things happened this year. Not big, crazy publication-deal things, but things:

I finished my first novel for instance, and I decided to write a second one—for good measure and all. Make sure the first one wasn’t a fluke.

 I FINALLY set a reading goal I could work with and I’ve wanted to try book reviewing for a long time and I ended up combining & completing both!

Now I'd like to pause here during my speech and thank the 'Do You Have Goals?' blog hop hosted by authors Misha Gericke and Beth Fred.

For those of you who have no clue what I'm talking about, the 'Do You Have Goals?' blog hop is all about setting big (IMO crazy) goals and then blogging updates on said goal(s). There are 19 of us now, and there's always room to make that 20, 21, 22...

Think about it.

2014 also marked my 1-year blogiversary.

I never thought starting this blog that I would last a year. But this blog hop kicked my butt into gear and the Update Day blog posts we (typically!) every last Friday of the month was a way for me to look forward to something.

It's like being invited to a birthday party, RSVPing and then showing up without a present.

I didn't want to show up empty-handed to the next Update Day, so I would aim to DO something to write about. Blogging with an update about how "I didn't do anything" wasn't tolerated.

This year I’d like to ground new writing and reading/reviewing goals (and if I’ve learned something in 2014, I don’t do brevity but I’ll try to keep this short).

***

2015 Writing Goal:

Last New Years’ Eve I set a stupid goal of writing 750 words/daily after being inspired by this site: 750words.com.

And it wasn’t that it was stupid so much as it was wrong for me. 2014 definitely taught me—through trial and error—that I’m not the sort of person that works efficiently in a boxed-in scenario. (I tried it during NaNo…yeah. It wasn’t fun those first few days. Cabin fever and whatnot.)

Writing 750 words/daily is a great goal—just not for me! (In fact I gave up on another goal like this where I was planning to write 1 million words by Mother's Day 2016).

Still I ended up writing 274K-worth of completed and in-progress works (>>>look to your write at the word count bars for proof>>>). It snuck up on me as I was completing stories (fiction and fanfiction) and…it hit me. Somehow I ended up reaching a goal I no longer had a care for. Crazy right? (But isn’t that what this blog hop is about…tackling crazy, big goals?)

But even though I kinda wrote 750 words daily I don’t want to rinse and repeat anytime soon.

No. 2015 is just going to be about writing daily. Rather than set a word count goal, I’m going to keep it short. I’m committing to a one-sentence goal.

As long as I write one complete (hopefully grammatically correct) sentence in all 365 days of the coming year then I’ll be as good as gold.

One sentence examples:

“Every year she set the same resolutions.”

“She typed up the blog post before getting ready for the New Years' party.”

"'I can do it!'"

***

2015 Reading + Reviewing Goal:

Last year I set up a reading/reviewing goal. I combined the two because I’ve always wanted to try my hand at regularly reviewing the books I read. Mostly because I’m always sharing details with my family who haven’t read the book and though they look super interested, they’re too polite to tell me to “shut the eff up”.

So that’s where this blog came in handy! :)

My 2014 reading goal was to read and review 30 books. I did that. And then I went on to review 11 other books.

Ahem.

Yes, after reviewing 41 books though I’ve decided that I’m not really cut out to be a professional book reviewer.
Nope. I can’t do it.

Yet I’m renewing the reading + reviewing for 2015—ONLY because I like going back and remembering what I thought about a book sometimes. And it wasn’t all bad… Just not always fun.

So for 2015 I’m going to also up the challenge and aim to read & review 53 books. Why such a crazy number? Because I want to read + review on a weekly basis, and there’s about 52ish weeks of the year. It’ll keep me on my toes.

***

Goal-wise that’s it for me.

Some other stuff I’m going to try to do in 2015 includes baking more, participating in more local 'writerly' activities, saving more and figuring out my personal finances—that sort of stuff.

Happy New Years to all of you, and may 2015 be exciting, memorable and fruitful—hehe, that word—as 2014 has (or has not) been.

See you on the other side…