I took time over my holiday to consider how I wanted to fit writing into my life in 2009. I want to feel challenged without feeling stressed but still achieve as much as I'm mentally able. There are certain realities of working the day job and spending time with friends and family that will mean greater or lesser impacts on my writing. I need to accept that because I'm putting these ahead of my writing that I will be less productive than I would like.

Yup, there are no greater expectations than those that you can put on yourself and I certainly do.

One of my goals this year is to submit Rebuilding Retehoro. I would love to have it submitted before I travel to the UK in May. I worked out exactly what I'd need to do in order to reach this self imposed drop dead date (helped along by some calculations from Thinking Sideways). It went something like this:

  • Jan 12 - Feb 28: Revise all of Rebuilding Retehoro, one pass.
  • March: Edit all of Rebuilding Retehoro, second and final pass.
  • April: Gain critique, make changes, prepare submission and submit.
To revise all of Rebuilding Retehoro in one pass by the end of February I have to halve the daily scene count that I'm comfortable with. I worked it all out, did up a pretty spreadsheet to taunt me and got ready to revise 2.5 scenes yesterday. I revised half of the first scene without pushing myself to the point of mental exhaustion and morphing into grumpy wife. I really liked what I got (and still do) and felt that I kept busy all night with the things that were important to me.

I'm not prepared to push myself so hard that it becomes unproductive. I'm slowly starting to find that balance and if that means that I won't be achieving things as quickly with my writing as I'd like then that's just tough.

Part of setting goals is to first decide what you want to achieve and then identify what it's practical for you to achieve. In this way you set yourself up for a challenging win instead of a discouraging loss.