To start with, I should say that I unashamedly stole the idea for this blog post from Yolanda Sfetsos. I've never done anything like this before, so I'm going to wing it, and probably borrow a lot from her 2024 list, and I reserve the right to come back and update my own goals as new ones occur to me. So, here's the list, complete with commentary!

• Write 100k-200k words - This simultaneously seems like a lot to write, and also not so much. The book that I wrote in 2024 for NaNoWriMo (which took me until the end of December to finish) was just under 95k words. I wrote a fairly long short story earlier in the year that clocked around 16k words, then another short story at the end of December which had 4,400 words. So, I know I can do it. I guess I'm going to be aiming for the higher end of this range. My biggest fear is the time spent editing last years NaNoWriMo novel will take away from time I could be writing.

• Publish something - I know it's going to be a real stretch to get my novel published outside of KDP, but I think I have a good chance at getting a short story published by a smaller indie publisher. The thing is, I'm not sure how much I want to do that. I'm not a control freak, but I do prefer to have full control over things that I create myself. I'm not necessarily worried about publisher wanting to change what I've written, but I might want to self-publish a collection of my own short stories, and I don't know if I want to be filling up the front matter with "first published in" attributions.

• Keep walking - I lost a lot of weight before my wedding by doing a lot of walking and being very careful with my calorie intake. While I'm not so much trying to lose weight any more, I do want to keep walking for a number of reasons. Primarily, I don't want to regain all of the weight I've already lost, and I've got one hell of a sweet tooth. The neighborhood I live in is okay for walking, there just aren't any actual walking trails.

• Write at least one novel - This is kind of a gimme, since I can expect to do this exact think in November/December for National Novel Writing Month, but it still goes on the list. It would be nice to think I could write two novels this year, but I'm not sure how dividing my time between short stories and a novel will work.

• Write at least six short stories - Six is an arbitrary number that I just pulled out of my ass. I have no idea how many short stories I'll actually be able to write, but I honestly feel like six should be easy to accomplish. As I said with the previous item, though, I'm not sure how dividing my time between a novel and short stories will work.

• Finish editing my 2024 novel - I'm not sure how other writers feel about going back through their works and proofreading/editing them, but I'm not really loving it, myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm finding a lot of things that need attention and fixing, but every hour I spend going over stuff I've already written is an hour I'm not spending writing new stuff. Regardless of how I feel about it, I'm hoping to have at least one pass through The Kraken's War finished by the end of January.

• Stop using the word "that" so much - One of the things I learned at the very end of 2024 (after I'd written most of my novel), is I use the word "that" too much. Not to the point of being distracting or detrimental, but it's usually being used as a useless filler word, so a lot of the time I'm spending editing is just me removing or replacing the word "that". It's a lesson learned, and I'm expecting to do better in the future.

• Join a writing group(?) - There's a big fat question mark at the end of this one, because I'm not sure about how much of my time this sort of thing would occupy. I'll have to do some research before I make a decision.