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It's 2016. I don't know how you feel about it, but I was completely blindsided. Sure, the new year has been looming for months now, but then all of a sudden it just showed up like an uninvited relative hogging your couch and eating out of your refridgerator. It's here and here to stay.

I had been looking forward to 2016, then somewhere around mid-October the clock started turning double time and I found myself far busier than I, or the laws of nature and psychics intended.

Based on the above, you can probably suspect that I'm glad to see 2015 go. Don't get me wrong, it was a great year, but I've been itching to recalibrate and refocus. I've never been one for resolutions, since I already have them broken before I get the chance to get them out of my mouth, but I do set yearly goals, and like most years they include some writerly type things.

Finish my 3 WIPs: Yep, you heard it here first, I have not one, not two, but three WIPs in varying states of completion between the 75-95% marks that desperately need some closure. I love all these stories, but each one is vastly different and I have a bad habit of becoming enamoured with any two of the projects that I am not currently working on. But that's gonna change! I'll have to love the one I'm with if it kills me as I have made a promise to myself  (and my writing group - damn accountability!) that I will start no new projects - novel length anyway - until all three projects are at least in the shiny completed first draft stage.  

Write Every Day-ish: I've tried. I really have, but I've never seemed to be able to keep up with this one. I always tell myself that I don't have time to do anything substantial so why bother unless I have time to make progress. Then days drift into weeks and I get nothing done, then I binge write and spend so much time trying to figure where I left off that I would have been more productive to have written 5 words a day to this point. So the new goal is 10 minutes a day. I know it's not much but hopefully I will write more than the minimum and at least keep my plot fresh in my mind. I have an app to record this. It's happening. Exception: There is no way I'm writing in Vegas this year or if I visit any places that have a swim up bar, hence the "ish". The relaxation is far more valuable than any words!!

Read More: You can always read more books. It's great for writing research and it's the best thing I can do for my brain apart from locking myself away from the world for five days (who has time for that?). I'm on Goodreads and I'm taking the Goodreads 2016 reading challenge. I'm slated for 30 books, more than two a month. Wish me luck.

Enjoy Ever Second of MIDWINTER's Release: Don't know if you heard, but I have this little thing going on this year called the release of my debut novel! I am so ridiculously excited about this experience, even though I know there is still a lot of hard work ahead of me before I will finally see my baby in pages. One of my biggest goals this year is to enjoy every minute of this release. You can only have a first time once, and for me it was definitely worth the wait!

So there you have the main goals for this year. I have a few others, like stalking Katie McGarry at RT Booklover's Convention (nothing illegal, just a little fangirling, call off the FBI), but here's hoping that 2016 is a writing success.

What are your goals for 2016?

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