2025 Goals

[rowyn]

 I have been unusually reluctant to settle on my goals for 2025. 

Part of it is that I want to make more granular goals than usual, and I want to do a bingo card for them because I heard that as a suggestion for goals and it sounds like fun.  But I can make a normal new year goal list and then break it down into a bingo card later. I don't need to wait until I've figured out everything before I can get started.

Goals 2025:

• Move to North Carolina
• Assist parents
• Collect the rest of my Apothecaria journal into epub(s)
• Independent of my Apothecaria journal, complete six writing/publishing stages
• Complete monthly updates
• Be gentle with myself

Stretch Goals 2025

• Keep up with the habit tracker most days
• Keep up with the art habit now that Apothecaria's complete (Doesn't have to be as often as "drawing most days". Producing one finished art a month, doing curator prompts. Anything that shows that I'm not forgetting to do drawing/painting for months at a time).
• Make a goals bingo card and see how that goes. I can add or restructure my goals any way I want for this. 
• Exercise 15+ times per month
• Play through a short journaling game
• Try some more journaling games
• Figure out how to measure personal improvement at art (every year this is a stretch goal because I still don't know how to tell)
• Read at least a few pages of fiction (or a nonfiction book) I didn’t write, on most days
• Redraw an old picture that I'd put considerable effort into at the time
• Promote my books a little
• Write 50 blog posts and maybe also post them?

Details

The Move

The critical reason I'm moving to North Carolina is to provide care for my parents. But moving to North Carolina makes sense even beyond that. Despite living in Missouri for twenty-eight years, I've never really "built a life" around the community here. I am unlikely  to build one in NC, either. My life is online and at my computer, and this is what I enjoy. But I already have friends in the area where my parents live, and given that I always make a point of seeing them when I visit my parents, it's likely that I'll see them at least once or twice a month if I live in the area, too. That's more often than I'm likely to get out in my current area. 

So, while I will let myself off the hook for moving if something happens and it no longer makes sense for me to provide care for my parents, moving is a good idea. I don't plan to keep my house in Missouri because I don't plan to return here, regardless of what happens with my parents.

Writing/Publishing Stages

These are:

• Outlining
• Drafting
• Initial Edit
• Final Edit
• Cover Creation
• Layout/publishing

They are not all equal. The stage that takes the most time Actually Doing the Thing is generally drafting, but drafting takes the least mental effort/willpower, other than cover creation. The part that takes the most time psyching myself up to do the thing is usually the initial edit, though the final edit is close competition and sometimes harder. Outlining gets harder every time I do it, but this is because I've been pushing much of the stuff I used to leave for Drafting into Outlining. Layout/publishing is so easy that I'm only giving it a stage because I deserve a cookie for getting that far.

This is my approximate timeline for each stage. Times are laughably imprecise.

• Outlining: 3 weeks
• Drafting: 12 weeks
• Initial edits: 9 weeks
• Final edits: 9 weeks
• Cover Creation: 3 weeks
• Layout/publishing: 2 days

But this timeline should not be interpreted as "it takes 36 weeks and 2 days for Rowyn to turn an idea into a published book." First, I don't work that way: I don't pick an idea and then work on it and only it until it's published. I give pretty much every book two rest periods of at least a month: between drafting and initial edits, and between initial edits and final edits. Many books get long rest periods here, and often I take breaks on books at other points, including in the middle of stages. Ask me how many incomplete outlines I have! I don't know, I'd have to dig around. At least three?

For my six completed stages in 2025, I expect something like:

• 4 stages on Be That Way: initial edits, final edits, cover creation, layout/publishing. Time: 21.5 weeks
• 1 stage on The Secret Dragon: drafting. Time: 11 weeks. (I got about a week done on it in December)
• 1 stage on new WIP: outlining. Time: 3 weeks.

I expect November will take me around halfway through drafting a new WIP, but I won't finish it this year.

My process generally involves some overlap -- I'm likely to make a cover at the same time that I'm drafting or editing a different book without changing the time estimate for either. I briefly entertained overbooking myself and setting the goal at 8 stages, which would be perfectly achievable in a year where I wasn't moving and wasn't caregiving for two elderly parents. I am moving and caregiving. Sure, let's build some slack into that schedule.

Also, this is not The Official Schedule To Which I Must Hew. I have to do 6 stages. It doesn't matter what 6 stages.

Turning my Apothecaria journal into ebooks is a separate goal because (a) I don't know whether I'll be able to get the last 221 entries into one book or if it'll have to be two -- the image files are BIG and Atticus struggles to combine 200+ of them into one epub -- and (b) I refuse to edit it on the grounds that I'm not making any money from them and also editing the entries is a nightmare because each page is laid out with its illustration in ArtRage, which is a paint program, not a layout program. So (c) the only stages for it are "cover creation", which I am skimping on because Not Getting Paid, and layout, which is the easiest stage. The Apothecaria journal would artificially inflate the number of stages I can do in a year. Especially if I split the last 221 entries into two epubs instead of one.

Habit Tracker

Spirit City has a weekly habit tracker, where you can enter habits and then check them off if you do them. I like this concept and made it into a spreadsheet so I could look at past weeks and not just the current one. My current habits are: Edit, Write, Draw, Exercise, Read,  4tw. "4tw" is just "did I maintain my 4thewords streak this day y/n". "Read" means "read at least a few pages of fiction written by someone other than me." The bar for checking a box is low and I like it that way. 

I started using this on January 4 and even with the bar being low, I haven't checked off "Edit" once yet. o_o;;; I need to start on that soon, because one January goal is "read through Be That Way and make an editing list." That doesn't require a lot of time spent editing, but it does mean some. 

Blog Posting

I have actually written posts for Dec 14 through Jan 11. Some days are more detailed than others; I stopped writing about my days for two or three weeks and then got back to it and wrote what I remembered of the missing days. But I never bothered to post any of it. I kind of do need to post it because Dreamwidth is how I organize that sort of information and if it's not here I won't be able to find it again. I should just backdate a bunch of entries to keep it from being one ginormous entry. It might exceed the post length maximum for DW at this point. Idk if DW has a post length maximum tho. If it doesn't, I could just post it as one ginormous private entry, which would have the dual virtues of "putting it where I can find it later" and "not spamming folks with 30 days' worth of back entries."