Time Management Tuesday: The Recapitulation Post

For the ninth year, I am doing an end-of-the-year recapitulation post in which I go over my professional goals and objectives for the  past year, determining what worked and what didn't, what I want to continue doing, what I want to change. This will set me up for planning next year's goals and objectives, which will go up next week. 

If you've formally created goals and objectives for the year (or any other period of time you choose to use), a recapitulation post should be pretty easy to do. 

Goal 1. Finish a draft of YA thriller that could become an adult thriller. It has a name this year, 143 Canterbury Road   Ah, no, but I have made serious progress and am happy with what I've done.

Objectives:

• I haven't work on this for a few months, so I'll need to reread what I've done to bring myself back up to speed.  Did this
  
• Go over the outline/blueprint. Did this
  
• Assign writing tasks to time frames each week. I didn't do much of this. It seems to add an extra level of work. I find I prefer sticking to tinkering with an outline/blueprint.
  
• Just work on scenes. Don't worry about connecting things. Yeah, no.
  
• Read YA thrillers. I did do this. Most of them, not that memorable.
  
• Read history, since that's a significant factor for a character and maybe in other ways. And I did do this.
  

Goal 2. Concentrate on submissions and concentrate on increasing the number of submissions I make. I made 70 submissions this year, up from 50 last year. That included 4 rounds of PitMad. This resulted in 7 publications in Medium publications, and a very good rejection from another publication.

Objectives:

• Submit book length projects to the agents I researched last month. Did that.
  
• 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. Did very little of this.
  
• Use that agent Twitter list I made a while back. Must have done that.
  
• Use that publications Twitter list I made a while back. Don't remember this.
  
• Do a lot more reading of markets for short-form writing. I do spend time on this.
  
• Not to brag, but I got my first rejection yesterday.
  

Goal 3. Work on short-form writing, essays and short stories. Done this.

Objectives:

• Commit a month or two to flash writing. I was happy with how that worked this past year. I'm doing that right now.
  
• Look for more on-line writing classes/workshops. I attended 4 workshops and 12 author presentations.
  
• Commit more time to reading essays and short stories  Yes
  
• Tinker with the 365 Story Project. Give it up, Gail
•  
  

Goal 4. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

 

Objectives: 

• Provide social media support for writers/bloggers generating diversity material. Not sure how much of that I've done.
  
• Pay more attention to community events like Multi-Cultural Children's Book Day; plan ahead for reading to support these events. I fell down on the job with this.
  
• Continue the monthly childlit book release posts. I made the decision to quit this and promote virtual author appearances.
  
• Attend virtual book launches and promote here. 5 or 6 of the author presentations I attended this year were book launches that I at least mentioned (adult books) here.
  
• Continue with Original Content. Obviously
• Continue with promoting Original Content at Facebook communities, Goodreads' blog, and Twitter. Yes
  
• Get into the habit of checking my monthly plans in my bullet journal. I did a little better at this.
  
• 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 managed this one.
  

Though the world appears to be going to hell in a hand basket, as my mother would say, I managed to make some small professional progress and take advantage of some opportunities that came my way.