Happy New Year to you all and welcome to 2009. It is bright and sunny here this morning, a good start to the year.
I’m not one to normally make new year resolutions – they invariably last all of a couple of days – but for this year I am setting out some goals I’d like to achieve. I’m not normally one to make plans or set goals either, but it is about time I did, get things moving along again.
Some of these are shorter term goals, others are year long goals.
Three Month Goals
In about three months I will need to start looking for work again, unless something extraordinary happens before then. I could go longer, but given the current economic climate that is about when I’ll have to start looking to give myself time to find something.
In the meantime I aim to write 20,000 words a week (or slightly less than 3,000 a day). Yes, it is an ambitious goal, but doable, and without ambition you can’t really get anywhere. I was reading of one author, back in the days of the pulps, who wrote 8,000 words a day, 7 days a week. We have advantages, such as computers, that he didn’t have, so I see no reason it can’t be done.
Write one short story per week/fortnight. Short stories range in length from 2,000 to 10,000 words, so it will probably be the later rather than the former in time frame. The reason for this is to get something finished and to have a break from the main novel when I need one.
Year Goals
Finish a novel or more. Hopefully more than one if I can keep up the pace of writing set.
Get an agent. That seems to be the main trick to getting published – finding a good agent. Dependent on finishing a novel though.
Get published. Isn’t that the dream of all authors? Mostly dependent on the previous step, getting an agent, though not always.
Learn the bagpipes. Truly the greatest instrument known to man – nothing compares to the sounds of massed pipes and drums. It it the one instrument above all others I want to learn, so hopefully this year.
Mist and Shadows 
Good luck with your goals! Gotta dream big to gain big things right? It’s so weird the number of people who are learning/re learning an instrument as a goal this year lol, weird but awesome. Love bagpipes, though I had a phase of hearing phantom ones….
Might as well aim for the stars and fail spectacularly than barely make a mark. Somewhat an odd view for my normally no-risk arch-conservative nature.
I think you will find that if you ask most people, two things they would all say they want to do are write a book and learn an instrument. There is a lot of competition out there.