Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Time Management Tuesday: Second Quarter Check-in For Goals And Objectives.

Once again, creating goals and objectives for the year won't do you any good, if you forget about them. One of my objectives this year for my Community Building/General Marketing/Branding Goal is to check in with my goals and objectives quarterly to make sure I'm spending my time the way I'd planned to. 

Below I go over the objectives I'm still working on. In the first quarter post, I discussed the ones I'd completed.

Goal 1. Finish a draft of a YA, possibly adult, thriller, now called  143 Canterbury Road   

 Objectives worked on this quarter:

  • Assign writing tasks to time frames each week. By the second quarter I'd pretty much abandoned this. I do have little pieces of paper all over my desk that I was going to use for that that I now use for other things.
  • Just work on scenes. Don't worry about connecting things. I may go back to this at some point.
  • Read YA thrillers. I'm always looking for, and reading these.
  • Read history, since that's a significant factor for a character and maybe in other ways. As planned, I've started Jill Lepore's These Truths and Susan Strasser's Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.
  • As planned last quarter, I did commit my May Days project to this goal. I nearly reached the point I wanted to reach when I realized I needed to start a new draft. I seem to have slowed down again this month.

 Plan for next quarter:

I really want to get this draft done, so I can spend the rest of the year on short-form work. That probably won't happen next quarter.

Goal 2. Concentrate on submissions and increasing the number of submissions I make.  I've made 35 submissions so far this year, up from 17 at the end of March. The second quarter submissions did result in a publication, Relieve Your Anxiety NOW! at The Haven, which I will be discussing here at some point. I also submitted the first chapter and a half or so of an adult book-length manuscript to a contest. That is totally new for me. Though I know that there are writers who submit to contests regularly, I usually stay away from them. They almost always have submission fees, which makes them a lot like gambling to me. I have no moral objection to gambling, but I tend to do it with my life rather than with money. However, last summer I spent a few hundred dollars on a terrific on-line writers' workshop, and since I haven't been able to find one for this year, I feel I can use a little of the cash I would have spent on that on a contest or two.

Objectives worked on this quarter:

  • Spend more time with essay Facebook group and flash Facebook group. Those people are publishing and share their work, exposing me to new markets. Which is not stalking them. I have not done enough stalki--spending time with this group. I hope to do more after I finish the 143 Canterbury Road draft.
  • Use that agent Twitter list I made a while back. I have made an attempt at this.
  • Use that publications Twitter list I made a while back. I run my eyes over this occasionally.
  • Do a lot more reading of markets for short-form writing. I do this, but in a chaotic way.

Plan for next quarter:

Focus more on submitting short-form work.

Goal 3. Work on short-form writing, essays and short stories. I haven't done a lot with this, though I am becoming more and more eager to.

Objectives:

  • Commit a month or two to flash writing. I was happy with how that worked this past year. That hasn't happened...yet.
  • Look for more on-line writing classes/workshops. I haven't found anything, but I'm hoping an organization that was running virtual workshops this spring will be back at it this fall.
  • Commit more time to reading essays and short stories. Have not done much of this. But I'm reading more poetry than I have in the past, for what that's worth.
  • Tinker with the 365 Story Project. Yeah, that's probably over for this year, if not forever.

Plan for next quarter:

Get 143 Canterbury Road done so I can move on to other things!!! Also, I want to do some reading about women's humor.

Goal 4. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

 

Objectives: 
  • Provide social media support for writers/bloggers generating diversity material. They are part of the monthly new book posts I do.
  • Pay more attention to community events like Multi-Cultural Children's Book Day; plan ahead for reading to support these events. In April I took part in a month-long #AuthorLifeMonth event on Twitter. It gave me an opportunity to tweet about Saving the Planet & Stuff in a socially acceptable way.
  • Continue the monthly childlit book release posts Doing that.
  • Attend virtual book launches and promote here. I have done that.
  • Continue with Original Content. You're seeing that.
  • Continue with promoting Original Content at Facebook communities, Goodreads' blog, and Twitter. Doing that, but not as much as I should.
  • Get into the habit of checking my monthly plans in my bullet journal. I am still continuing to do that, and it is helping a bit.
  • Check-in with goals and objectives quarterly. I'd say "monthly" but that was an objective for last year that I didn't touch. I've done it twice!

Plans for next quarter:

Keep struggling along.

I must admit that I'm experiencing some difficulty transitioning back to a nonpandemic world of visiting family members and catching up on doctors' appointments. I keep thinking, Why didn't I do more in 2020 while I was home a lot and had a chance? In reality, I wasn't home all the time, and I did do a lot with short-form classes and starting short-form writing. That short form work just hasn't been completed yet, but it's available to me, so I should be happy about that. 

And if I should be happy about something, I will be happy about it.

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