Four years ago I discovered that coming up with ideas for stories was extremely fun. Since then I’ve been countless hours discussing story ideas with friends and families. I’ve created worlds, developed magic systems, invented gods, demons, villains, and crafted journeys for characters waiting to be imagined into existence.
When my friend Jace first shared his story idea, born of Spartan Smackdown on his mission, I was stoked as we continued to develop the story.
One day that story will be written, and it will be a most exciting story, but that day is not today. Before I take on the epic masterpiece that will be that story, I need to hone my writing till I am worthy of writing it.
Last week I shared on social media four book ideas and asked my friends and fellow readers which they would most like to read, along with the promise that I would write the story this year. The story that they wanted to see me write is the story of the Chaos Guard.
A promising soldier is chosen to join the Chaos guard. The Chaos guard are an elite force imbued with magic for the soul purpose of guarding the god of darkness Chaos. Should Chaos break free, he will unleash darkness upon the world and destroy mankind, at least that is what Davin has been led to believe…
My Goals 2023
One thing I’ve learned about setting goals is that having too many becomes overwhelming. As a general rule of thumb I set one or two goals for several areas of my life. For my writing I have three interconnected goals.
1. Write a book
2. Write Every Day
3. Grow my writing blog
I know that things don’t always go according to plan, I don’t know what is going to happen this year. I’m going to run into challenges, I’m going to have periods where I absolutely kill it, and I’m going to have many many days that fall in between, and that’s okay. As long as I keep my goal in front of me, I know I can reach it.
Since writing a book is a fairly vague goal, I’m breaking mine down into a base goal and a stretch goal.
Base Goal: Finish writing a first draft of at least 75,000 words. To get there I need to spend time planning out scenes, building out the world, creating my magic system and characters, do the actual writing, and then go back and do basic edits and fix plot holes.
Stretch Goal: Send my book out to beta readers, complete any rewrites, and have a complete book ready to be published.
Share with me your 2023 goals (writing or non-writing) in the comments below.
Accomplishing The Goal
I wrote a post a few weeks ago laying out 4 Ways to Keep Your Writing Resolutions, and over the next week I’m going to be making plans and building out a schedule to help me stay on track. Thankfully I already have a trusty writing group consisting of my buddy Garrett (who did complete his book this last year), and my sister Meghan (author of Sentenced to Writing).
I still need to plan out what books I’m going to read throughout the year, so if you have any recommendations I’d love to hear them.
To help me stay accountable with my book writing goal, I’m going to be creating a page on my site where I will share progress updates, challenges I’m facing (and how I get past them), as well as tidbits of my story.
This year is going to be an awesome year, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this story develops. It’s one thing to have fantastic ideas in your mind, it’s an entirely different thing to have those ideas take to paper in a way that others can experience those fantastic ideas.
I love your ambitious goals.
Mine are to finish editing and revising my novel. Then hopefully begin working on another novel and get 80,000 words into that one by the end of the summer.
My main writing goal is to develop the habit of writing. My goal last year was to write a book, and that’s where my planning stopped. This year, I want to write 20 days out of each month. My track record is pretty consistent that when I actually sit down and write, that I can crank out at least 2000 – 4000 words. If I do that consistently enough each month, by the end of the year my book will definitely be completed.