And Hello, 2016!

New Year’s Day prompts most of us to think anew about how to make our lives better, more satisfying, more productive, and so on. Since I began this blog in June 2012, I have used the first post of the year to set goals and the last post to assess my progress or lack thereof. This is somewhat amusing, since in real life I never make resolutions. Either I do things or I don’t, and declaring goals in advance makes little difference to the outcome. But I do find it helpful to think a few times a year about my career as a writer and publisher and what I need to do to succeed.

The list for 2016 includes:

(1) finishing the final draft of The Swan Princess and seeing it in print and e-book formats;
(2) making significant progress on The Vermilion Bird, preferably to the point of a full rough draft (even if it’s very rough);
(3) chairing a round table on the uses of historical fiction in the classroom, scheduled for November 2016 but not yet approved by the sponsoring organization;
(4) upping the number of my New Books in Historical Fiction interviews to one every three weeks, yielding eighteen for the year;
(5) maintaining my website and the Five Directions Press website—which means implementing the book recommendation posts, expanding the number of authors and titles available, filling out the More Books Worth Reading page, and keeping the news & events page up to date;
(6) posting to this blog every Friday;
(7) maintaining and strengthening my relationships with fellow writers; and
(8) continuing to improve my grasp of marketing, on both my own behalf and that of Five Directions Press.

Of course, I also have to keep making a living and finding time to write. And I have signed up for three GoodReads challenges for 2016, only because I can apply books to more than one category. These are the Read Women 2016 challenge (most of the books I read are by women, except for books associated with interviews, and living authors count for this one), the Dead Writers’ Society Genre Challenge (one book a month by a no-longer-with-us author in an assigned category), and the Birthday Challenge (one book a month by a deceased author born in that month).

Will I make it? Check back in December to find out. And between now and then, may you have a rich and rewarding 2016!


Image: Clipart no. 109546550.