I've been doing a recapitulation post related to my work (yeah, I'm not touching my personal life) since 2012. You can read about the Yoga Journal article that inspired my annual recapitulation.
What recapitulation involves, for my purposes, is going over the work goals and objectives I created back in January and assessing how I did with them. Among other things, it helps set me up for creating work goals and objectives for the next year.
The Heritage Month Project became a very big part of my reading, blogging, and writing this year. In fact, two of my Medium essays on Heritage Month reading were boosted by the platform, which drew a lot of readers to one of them. The Heritage Month Project was not a goal for 2025. I must have thought of it in January.
Goal 1. Write and Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor
My plan was for this to be my main focus for 2025. And it was.
Objectives:
- Work on the starts made during December. Yes! I worked on 7 of these starts, submitted them, and had 3 accepted for publication.
- Make two submissions a month. Anything. Anywhere. I made 53 submissions this year, so I nailed this objective. Though I wasn't formal about getting 2 out a month, I must have done more than that. For those 53 submissions I got 19 publications, including 1 to a college literary magazine, which was gratifying. Yes, good to recall that, since not 5 minutes ago I got a rejection from an on-line litjournal.
- Read short-form work every day, using my new reading system that I will someday do a blog post about. Both to enhance my mind, of course, but to look for new publications to submit to. Try to read both a short story and an essay from that system I just mentioned. I have no recollection of that reading system was. I did use Lent as a temporal landmark to manage reading short-form work every day during that period. It was not a good experience.
- Focus on short-form reading during Retreat Week, which is coming up soon. I think I did that. The thing I really recall from last year's Retreat Week was watching videos from a local historical society. Those were great.
- Expand my reading of publications on the Medium platform, looking for new sites to submit to. Yes.
- Take workshops on short-form writing. Took 7 workshops! Also, at the beginning of the year, I started going through notes from earlier workshops, which was helpful, but I didn't finish.
- Spend more time with essay Facebook group. Really. Maybe I should just give up this objective.
- Revise a chapter in my scifi adult book as a short story. I started it!
- Submit that scifi story, of course. It should go without saying, but these are objectives, so I'm saying it. I didn't finish the short story, so I didn't get to this point.
Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work
I made this a more important goal last year. The point was to broaden readership and create an identity as a short-form writer.
Objectives:
- Keep the short-form publications features on website updated. I have trouble doing this. I'm behind.
- Continue with the Annotated Reading posts on Original Content, which support other writers. I gave up on this when I got started on the Heritage Month Project.
- Continue promoting the Annotated Reading posts on BlueSky, which both supports other writers and connects with them. Continued until I stopped doing the Annotated Reading posts.
- Continue republishing the Annotated Reading posts as Random Reading articles on Medium. This both supports other writers and fills any gaps in my publishing history there. The bulk of the work is already done, so we're not taking a labor-intensive task. Stopped that when I stopped doing the Annotated Reading posts here. Those received no attention on Medium.
- Attend virtual events for writers. I can't recall any of these. There may be far fewer of them now.
- Attend local events for local writers. I went to a fantastic book walk featuring local writers.
- Continue supporting local writers on Facebook by sharing their local public events. Yes. I did quite a bit of this.
- Update website and blog to feature BlueSky instead of Twitter. Done.
- Work on increasing followers on both Medium and BlueSky. Even though many of the people who follow me at those places do not seem to be people who would be at all interested in my writing. Perhaps you have read that engagement on Blue Sky is low? I find that to be very true. Expanding followers there is very difficult. Part of this may be because on Twitter I was still part of a children's lit world and that was a big part of my Twitter world. On BlueSky I concentrate on other types of writers and publications, and it's always difficult to break into a new network.
Goal 3. Submit book-length Work to Agents and Editors
This was way down in my goal list this year. I have the manuscripts done, so I haven't forgotten about them. But they're no longer my big focus.
Objectives:
- Submit to an agent if one catches my attention. It appears that I submitted to 5 agents this year.
- Submit this month to an agent who has already caught my eye. Three of the 5 submissions were in January, so presumably the agent I was referring to here was one of them.
- Follow agents on BlueSky. I have not done this since moving to BlueSky. That's how iffy I feel about pursuing this goal. Not many.
- Take part in BlueSky pitches. I'll be missing the first one next week while on retreat. I found very few of these.
- Pay attention to agents featured in SCBWI's monthly publication. Yes,
Goal 4. Play with the 19th Century Novel Idea, Which Does Have a Title, But is Mainly a Fun Think Piece
Objectives:
- Continue researching fun stuff. Yes.
- Continue using the organizational system of the fun stuff research that I managed to create the end of last year. Not that great an organizational system.
- Focus on creating characters. Yes. And came up with a few more. Because you can never have too many characters, right?
- Focus on more plot points. I actually did well on this.
- Maybe write some bits and pieces. Started a couple scenes during the Advent Project.
- Read more historical fiction. I definitely did this.
Thoughts Regarding 2025
Finding time to work was a struggle this year, yet I managed 53 submissions and 19 publications. I would have liked broader readership for those published works but having them published is part way there. Also, not all of those submissions were for new work, but finding submission opportunities for older work is time well-spent, too.
As usually happens, creating this recapitulation post has provided me with some ideas for next week's goals and objectives for 2026. Stay tuned.
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