Come on in, 2019

Hi all. It’s been a little longer since I last posted here than I prefer, but that’s okay because I’ve got lots of good things going on 🙂

It’s my favorite day (night?) of the year so I wanted to chime in for a bit and share some of my 2019 goals.

Every year my wife and I sit down and set some goals for our family, our professional lives, and our side projects. It’s never a given that we reach these goals, but it’s so important to set goals–and plans for obtaining them. It helps you continue to grow in all aspects of your life.

So I set some pretty big writing goals in 2018 and, believe it or not, I failed to reach a single one. I could go through the whole list, but I want to look at the most important one. It was to finish a new novel in 2018. Not only did I not reach that goal, but I didn’t even come close.

Why did I not get that novel written?

It was for a couple of reasons, but the biggest one was a simple lack of direction. Instead of picking a novel to finish and setting some monthly or weekly goals to help get there, I continuously went back and forth between three separate WIPs. And when the lack of progress started to bother me, I switched over to short stories and did the same thing.

And that was dumb. It goes against everything I know about setting written goals. I had no plan, no focus, no deadline.

Now, to be sure, I didn’t just spend 2018 screwing around. I either wrote or worked on writing related things every single day of the year, without exception. For minimum of 90 minutes at night after the kids went to bed and more on weekends. Again, the problem wasn’t lack of motivation; just lack of focus.

While it might seem like I’m finishing 2018 on a down note, rest assured I am not.

There have been multiple positives this year. The traffic on this site and Theme of Absence, as well as the Write Good Books Podcast, has hit record highs. Every time I think about quitting the blog or Theme of Absence, I need to remind myself of that fact. Readership and subscribers increase every year. I’d like to thank all of you for that 🙂

The one big accomplishment I feel I should mention that came out of 2018 was that I created a fantasy card game. This was something that just kind of came to me, and I spent the entire month of December working on (hence the reduced amount of post and the missed weeks of the Podcast). I’ve got so many plans with this game, and am not quite ready to share everything yet, but you can get a preview of it by checking out the website I set up for it at https://www.52dragons.com. I also launched a Twitter account you can follow if you’re so inclined: https://twitter.com/52_dragons.

This game will take up quite a bit of my scheduled writing time for the next few months, but I have to say, I haven’t been this excited about one of my side projects since Holy Fudgesicles.

Finally, on a personal note, 2018 has been such a wonderful year for our family. My oldest is doing great in school and the next two are in an amazing preschool program. Our youngest is starting to talk and is just so much fun. The oldest three gave their first piano recital a few weeks ago and they did so well I can’t even describe it. My wife had another great year teaching and I am so proud of the impact she has on her students. She’s also made a ton of great progress on her side projects and is quickly becoming a piano pro as well.

So that’s it for this year. I’m hoping to start submitting short stories again while I work on the card game and keep the novels on hold for the year. We’ll get back on schedule with the podcast and I’ll try to come a little more back to life on the blog here as well.

I sincerely hope you all have an incredible 2019.

Thanks and Happy New Year!