Picture my kid took of a polar bear looking up into our tundra buggy.
It’s a new year, which means it’s time for me to look back at how I did meeting last year’s goals, and then look ahead to what I want to accomplish for the year to come.
2022 goals
- Publish consistently. I published 12 pieces on Medium, but they weren’t consistent. My last piece was in September. This is probably because I started a new job in October but also stayed PRN at the previous place for a while, so I was working about 50-60 hours/week over 5-6 days, while also finishing up my last prereq class for nursing school. So, not a lot of time for anything else.
- Keep traveling. This is the one goal I blew out of the water. I traveled somewhere every month except December, and this was defined as at least 2 nights, at least 250 miles away. January we went camping in the Everglades and Florida Keys. February I wandered around Arkansas and Louisiana. March we took the train to Santa Fe and Albuquerque. April was a culinary trip to Detroit. May I headed out to Wyoming for a weekend of hiking. June was a weekend train trip to Washington DC for a rally for people’s economic and social service rights. July we went hiking and kayaking in northern Michigan and Wisconsin. August was an EPIC van life trip across southern Canada to visit the Vikings in Newfoundland. September we went to Minneapolis for the Renaissance festival. October was another EPIC trip to Winnipeg and then Churchill, Manitoba, the polar capital of the world, to see polar bears in the wild. And then November, I spent a weekend chilling in Milwaukee, eating pasties and walking along the lake and sitting in my hotel room’s whirlpool tub drinking beer, because I earned it.
- Be more mindful regarding sustainability and my health. I started out strong with this – I bought a lot down the street and planted a bunch of fruit and nut trees, I finally got my chickens – but then I got too busy trying to work too much and take classes, and it came down to cooking or sleeping, and sleeping won out. I’d either pick something up, or just not eat other than snacks during my shift. I also haven’t been going to the gym more than once every week or two. So sustainable, yes, but healthy – probably not.
- Keep plugging away on my Heartsbane series, both writing and marketing. I kept picking at edits and haven’t published anything, but I did reach out to a cover artist who’s currently working on new covers for all the books, which should be done in the next few weeks.
- Start a series on Kindle Vella. I have a couple stories written for a couple series, but I want to have half a dozen before I publish anything.
- Read 100 books. I’m not even going to mention the embarrassingly small number of books I finished this year.
Let’s move onto the coming year.
2023 goals
- Write daily. Over the last year or two, I haven’t been writing much at all. I need to get into a habit of doing it, or I’m not going to meet any of my writing goals. At this point I’m not going to define how much I write; I’ll see how this fits into my schedule (working full time, plus starting nursing classes) and check back in later.
- Publish weekly. Another writing goal I won’t hit without goal #1. Medium, Vella, publication or small press, whatever – I want to get something out there every week. Again, I need to get into the habit of this. And I also would like to start publishing other than on KDP and Medium, to widen my audience.
- Share a new crochet pattern monthly and finish a project weekly. Part of the reason I haven’t been writing is that for the past year, I’ve been crocheting almost every day. When I get home from a long, emotionally draining shift, sometimes my best self care is to spend a little time making something mindless while watching a mindless YouTube video. I really enjoy the challenge of creating my own patterns, and I’d like to share them with the world. I also have wayyyyyyy too much yarn that I need to use up. You can find my yarn adventures here.
- Continue to live more sustainably. This will include continuing to cut down on my clutter as well as just not buying stuff I don’t really need in the first place, growing more of my own food (I’m getting bees this year!), and walking/riding my bike/taking the bus to work. My new job is only 1.5 miles from my house, so there’s no reason I can’t stop be ready for work early enough to have time to not drive. I’m also trying to cut a lot of extra sugar out of my diet, as well as processed food (including fast food/eating out) and meat. I’m pretty sure my veins were pure Pepsi for a while due to substituting soda for sleep for a solid 8-10 months this year, and I need to move away from that.
- Blog regularly. I want to publish a new blog post on this site at least 2-4 times a month. And I also want to publish a social work-related article/post on Medium monthly.
- Read 100 books. As always.
