Goal setting is incredibly important for a writer. You need to have clear, concise goals that are achievable, and you need to know how to reach those goals, and make each step its own miniature goal.
Personally I've got a couple Big Goals which are more long-term and several smaller goals which mostly build towards reaching those Big Goals. For example, one of my Big Goals is to finish the rough draft of one of the books in the Jihad series by January 1st, 2010. Smaller goals reaching towards that include worldbuilding, character building and outlining.
Here are my writing goals for September:
1. Blog consistently (at least every other day)
2. Get the poem count for Bleed up to 40 (I'm at 23 right now I believe)
3. Edit The Beginning myth for the Jihad world
4. Write 5 pages background notes on the original formation of Appollinia (a kingdom for Jihad)
5. Write 5 pages background notes on the old Elvish kingdom (Elwin's time and his son's time)
6. Write up a 3-page character bio for Elwin, the first Elvish king.
7. Write up 3 pages about the Phoenix (an old Goddess who is found in very early Elvish myth)
8. Write up 3 pages about the Demon (later named Elric; the main evil God)
9. Write up 3 pages about the Fatalis Intarnati (can't really explain these guys here)
10. Brainstorm possible plots in the Jihad world
11. Flesh out one of the adopted plots stolen from the Nano forums.
12. Write one chapter of A Cutter's Journey.
In order to reach all of these goals, I am enforcing a minimum productivity level of one worldbuilding page per day.
Also... I've decided to, at least for the moment, abandon Eternia Falling. Why? Because although I'm familiar with the characters and the world, I'm more familiar with the world 10, 000 years after the fact. I'm not very familiar with the world during Eternia's time. I need to do some mapping, some culture-building for the time period, things like that, before I can properly write the novel. So I'm abandoning that project for the moment, leaving me with more free time to accomplish other goals. Worldbuilding for that will begin again December first.
What are your writing goals for September?
This is a list of ten things you can look forward to here on this blog over the coming year. I've been planning quite a few workshops and things to do around here to make life more interesting. I've also been debating making a forum for these workshops. Anyone who would be willing to help me run it should contact me at diannalgunn@gmail.com about it.
Here are some things you can expect to see:
1. Early Releases Of Ebooks Bleed and Myths of Tamraq will both be announced here before anywhere else. I will also be releasing a couple free PDFs of myths. A Cutter's Journey will be announced here and on its own website a week before I go to any of my regular forums and places to announce it.
2. Nanowrimo World-Building Workshop This will be a two week workshop, with a half hour exercise every day. You can expect things like building a God, building a religion, looking at architecture, looking at weather, culture, and art. It will be run in the second week and second last week of October.
3. Nanowrimo Pep Talks I will be doing a weekly pep talk for Nanowrimo once again on this blog this year, because I had lots of fun last year. I'll also be looking for a couple other Nanoers and asking them to do guest post pep talks.
4. Dear Diary Workshop This will be going on next February. I will be doing my own Dear Diary, and each day have a list of questions to consider when writing your own. More on this later, when I have a proper 'course' outline type of thing.
5. World-Building Workshop This will be a multi-post workshop, each post focusing on a different part of the world building. There will be two exercises a week. This and the following few workshops already have basic outlines, and I'm seriously considering starting a forum for the different workshops on this blog.
6. Religion-Building Workshop This is another multi-post workshop which will be six weeks long, one exercise per week. It will cover how I usually build my religions and have various questions to ask. One of the exercises will be myth-building.
7. God-Building Workshop The Gods are characters too. This will be a four post workshop, two posts each over two weeks, about how to create a God.
8. Culture-Building Workshop This will be a six week workshop like the Religion one, with exercises focusing on art, myth, music and language.
9. Character-Building Workshop This workshop will be like the others, showing how I develop characters.
10. Plot-Building Workshop This workshop will cover various ways to build plot, including my reviews on two or three different methods and an overview of my own personal method.
These and much more will be coming over the next year. Thinking about it, I will be creating a forum in October which will have sub-forums for each workshop so that people who do the workshops at any time can discuss them.
Thanks for reading,
~Dianna
I've got very, very limited computer access right now (as in I only have it at my bf's), so my writing is flopping and so is my blogging.
But I AM alive. Yay.
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