MMXVI

tyunglebower ♦ January 4, 2016 ♦ 5 Comments

Happy New Year to all. I am obviously back at the blogging wheel as it were.

As I tend to do with the first post of each year, I’m just going to lay out the general plans I have for the year, a sort of accountability thing.

First I’ll say that I accomplished about 90% or so of my goals for 2015. Some did fall by the wayside, and I plan to make extra sure to work on such things this year.

For whatever reason, I came in under my goal for short story writing. If I am generous with my definitions, I might be able to claim to have accomplished half of my planned number of short stories, but in reality, I probably only wrote four certain stories out of the ten I said I would write.

True, I ended up writing a totally new, unplanned novel last year, and that makes me feel a bit better about my writing goals, but I must address last year’s seeming resistance to short story writing. Ten is again the goal by years end.

As an actor, I intended to read more plays last year than I did. Just something an actor should probably do. Doesn’t have to be new ones, as those can sometimes be difficult to obtain, as well as expensive. But plays I myself have not yet read, or seen performed somewhere. It wouldn’t hurt my playwrighting craft either.

I just barely attained my super-mega-modest quota of submitted my fiction to contests/journals last year. Even that didn’t happen until the final eight weeks or so of the year. The quota this year is equally modest by most standards, but I want to start earlier in the year. Way earlier.

“Pitching” is actually a decent umbrella term for several of my goals this year, in fact. I have a quota for submissions of my fiction, as I said. I also have a quota of freelance writing jobs to inquire about. Most ambitiously, I have a large (by my own standards very large) quota of pitching my one-man show to venues this year. It’s a free show, that I imagine most can use as a fundraiser, but it still had to be pitched to institutions. I hope to succeed better with such things this year.

And of course, I will have a new novel coming out sometime in the spring, my first mystery. I’ve want to improve drastically over the attention that my previous books have gotten.

Pitching things, especially myself, has always been a weak point in my arsenal, both in terms of mustering the energy and concentration to do so, and in regards to my success rate, as measured by acceptance on various levels. I believe in the quality of my work; it seems I’m not yet adept at getting other people to do so.

Not that I will be totally market-driven this year. In fact one of the broader goals I have for 2016 is to more openly embrace the creative process for its own sake, and to do so more often, and earlier in a project’s life.

To that end, I’d like to make some more artistically-minded friends. I have plenty of decent people in my life, some of whom are artists in their own right, but few with whom I can share my artistic struggles in conversation and experimentation. Even with the artist community, people have different chemistry from one another, and I need more people that are “on my wavelength” as it were. All artists need support from other artists, not merely happy words. My goal is to find more artists like myself, or at least those who understand and support the kind of artist I hope to be.

I’d like to find enough people to stage a reading of my original stage play sometime this year. I don’t know if there would be an audience present, or if it would just be a test reading with actors, but I’ll be working on the next revision of it this year after setting it aside for a while, and I’d like to see it come to life with people who appreciate the effort.

Plus a few other goals, the likes of which many writers and indeed many people in general make for themselves. Not resolutions, as I don’t believe in those, but concrete goals to accomplish in the next 360-odd days.

What do you want to get done in 2016?