Ok. All right. I know I said I was moving to my own website because I was sick of the Gutenberg Editor Block bullshit. I complained about WordPress.com, a lot. And I don’t take back ANY of those complaints. They’re valid. That being said, building my own site and coding it and trying to set up a newsletter has been so incredibly difficult. Gang, I am not “bad at computers” as my mother would say. I’m relatively technologically inclined. I’m a millennial who grew up coding her myspace page to include music and gifs before all of those things were simple.
Setting up this newsletter sign up about gave me an aneurysm. It’s supposed to be easy, which it wasn’t, which is why it made me so incredibly frustrated. Don’t tell me it’s easy and then have the entire functionality of your plugin just NOT WORK. I’m looking at you Mailpoet 3. Basically, I’m a super special unicorn that had a super weird problem where the sign up forms wouldn’t submit unless you were already logged into wordpress. Which sort of defeats the point of an email sign up form. No matter what workarounds, uninstalls, reinstalls, or third party plugins I tried, Mailpoet refused to work. Which is a shame because drafting emails and managing user lists actually seemed really intuitive and user friendly.
So now I’m using MailChimp, which isn’t half so user friendly, or capable for the free version — but it works! Seriously, I’ve spent at least five hours troubleshooting this and trying to make it functional and not completely fucking ugly. So please, please, please consider signing up for my mailing list? The newsletter will be once a month at most (unless I get some crazy news that I need to scream about) and will mostly be updates and links to what’s happening on the website. I won’t bombard you, I pinky promise.
All right. That’s out of the way. I’m gonna take a deep, restorative breath and move on with my life.
It’s January and I actually have a bit of stuff I’m working on, which means it’s time to think about goals. Historically, I take my yearly goals, break them into monthly goals, and then chop those into weekly goals which leaves me with a nice, bite-sized to-do list. I haven’t done this with any consistency pretty much since the pandemic started and royally fucked all our worlds. But, 2022 is starting with some seriously good vibes, so I’m jumping back into old habits.
I’ve already explained my yearly goals, so lets look at January and see what I can get done.
January
- Revise Tavi
- This is a huge goal for one month, I know. But, this book is so much closer to done than I originally realized. I have three major things that need revised, and while they aren’t small, they aren’t a soul-crushing amount of work either. And the sooner I get this done, the sooner I can get it in the hands of beta and sensitivity readers. The sooner they have it, the sooner I get their feedback and can make any final changes. And then I can start querying! So, getting Tavi “done” is my top priority this month.
- Write 5k words
- This is not a lot of words. But if I’m going to have a revision heavy month, I won’t have much time for drafting. I have a short story I started over Winter Break that I’m very close to finishing, and then it’s back to Victoria.
- Read at least three books
- This shouldn’t be an issue, and hopefully I can get closer to four or five.
I think that’s where I’m going to leave it. Three bullet points feels like not enough, but I don’t want to put too much on my plate when I want to revise my entire novel one, maybe two more times. So, that’s the month. What does that mean for the week ahead?
Week #1 Goals
- Revise at least ten chapters of Tavi
- Sounds like a lot, but it’s an Urban Fantasy with short, quick chapters. I think there’s forty-something total, so ~10 chapters a week should put me on track.
- Finish The Woman in the Woods
- This is the unexpected short story I started writing last week. I’m digging it, but it’s very weird. It’s almost done and I’m still not sure where it’s going. But, I should be able to reach a satisfactory end in one more sitting.
- Spend four hours on Victoria
- This book is very strange to me. It doesn’t follow any of my established writing routines or methods, so why should I force old metrics on it? We’re counting hours, not words, babeyy!
- Finish reading Pity the Reader
- I’m just over halfway through with this book, which I’m enjoying much more than I thought I would. Suzanne McConnell’s love of Vonnegut is apparent on every page, so much so that I’ve been moved to tears a couple of times already. She makes me regret never having met him, and makes me reflect on the teachers who have impacted me.
And that’s it. It all feels very doable at the moment, but I do return to work on Monday, sooooo… We’ll see. If I’m not back this week, I’ll be back on Monday with my first Goals Summary post of the year!
Until then, have a great week Blogland!
BZ
