January 2005 I: Happy New Year!

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I’m writing this early because I’ll be on vacation the first week of the New Year — my first vacation in more than four years! — and I’ll be leaving on the 31st

Anyway, have you written down your goals for 2005 yet? No? Well get to it! How can you get anywhere if you don’t know where you are going?

As I mentioned in a previous posting, I have some rather ambitious goals for 2005. Here are the highlights:

• Clean out my online files.

  I have e-mail saved from years ago. Do I really need them all? And if there are messages that have information I want to keep, wouldn’t they be easier to find as text files in an organized folder?

• Digitize more of the paper in my office.

  Not only are all those articles easier to use when in text files, they are easier to find and take up a whole lot less space!

• Complete the Travel Writing correspondence course I enrolled in late last year.

  Not only do I want to finish that particular project, I want to get going using my newly learned skills. In fact, I’ll be doing research during my vacation.

• Learn Spanish.

  I’m going to visit my family in Spain later in the year and would really like to be able to have a conversation with them. I took Spanish in High School, but all I remember are the highly useful verbs “to be,” “to dance” and “to know.” Also, I can only conjugate them in the present tense. Not terribly useful in a conversation, eh?

• Complete researching and write “Your Perfect Pie.”

  I usually publish a cook booklet for every even-numbered Christmas. This year, I was just too busy. So, I bumped it up a year.

• Take a couple more writing-classes.

  I have my eye on Pam White’s food writing course and AWAI’s copywriting course. I’ve decided that I’m dedicating 2005 to my writing, both fiction and non-fiction.

• Get a short story published for money!

  I’ll probably enter a few competitions, continue searching for homes for the few short stories I’ve completed and finish at least one more — if not two or three! I’d also like to join the Horror Writers Association and continue working toward meeting the pre-requisites need to join the Science Fiction Writers Association.

• Get some non-fiction articles published for money!

  I currently have about six or seven ideas to query and plan to dig more up on my vacation.

• Read, Read and Read some more.

  I have several months of Writer’s Digest, Saveur, Cooking Light, National Geographic Travel and other magazines to catch up on. I also want to read six to 12 books on writing this year. The titles on my shelf waiting to be read include: Conceiving the Heavens: Creating the Science Fiction Novel by Melissa Scott; Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by David Gerrold; On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King; The Travel Writer’s Guide by Gordon Burgett; Bob Bly’s Guide to Freelance Writing Success: How to Make $100,000 a Year as a Freelance Writer and Have the Time of Your Life Doing It by Bob Bly and The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing, Volume II edited by Jean M. Fredette.

• Be more regular with this blog.

So, do you think I’m ambitious enough? Are you being ambitious enough in your goals for 2005? As my motto goes, aim for the stars and if you only get to the planets, you’ve done pretty darn well.

Let’s face 2005 together with hope, courage and a fierce determination to succeed in every aspect of our lives!