Happy New Year, first and foremost, dear reader. I hope your 2019 turns out great, no matter how good (or bad) 2018 was to you and yours.

Writing-wise, my 2018 was pretty great. I was lucky enough to have not one but two short stories published, one in March and one in December, which is buoying me forward going into 2019 to do more. I have some plans in the works for ongoing submission calls and have also found some more to start working on, and I’m anxious to get started on those.

I do hope to develop better writing habits this year; I signed up for a great writing support group called Get Your Words Out but failed to meet my goal for 2018. I only signed up for the lowest option, too, for 75k words, but my biggest plan for hitting that – NaNoWriMo – fell extremely flat and left me way, way under that mark.

So I’m not going to sign up for that this year. Sure, there’d be some merit to doubling down and trying again, but I don’t think it’s going to work for me. I’ve tried it in previous years as well and have failed each time. I don’t think I can operate that way, at least I haven’t been able to thus far in life.

My approach this year is going to be focused on meeting smaller deadlines instead of a year long goal. Instead of trying to write X amount of words overall, I want to write and submit more entries to open submissions than I did last year. That’s not a large number either, as I really only submitted one thing in 2018 (aside from several entries in the Kit Sora flash fiction challenge).

That feels a lot less daunting than hitting a large goal. On top of that, I do have something larger I want to work on, but likewise I don’t want to set myself up for failure or set an unrealistic goal. So I’ll work on that while also writing and submitting smaller pieces throughout the year.

That’s the goal, at any rate. Let’s see what 2019 has in store for us, and best of luck to everyone reading this for your own projects in the new year.