Time Management Tuesday: The Recapitulation Post, 2024!

I'm at it again, folks. Recapitulating, this time for 2024. I've been doing this since 2012. My ability to stick with things is impressive, isn't it? For what it is worth? Here 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.

I've got to say, 2024 was productive as far as, you know, productivity is concerned, but December had a lot of rejection. Not leaving the year on as much of a high as I should be.

Goal 1. Adult Essays, Short Stories, and Humor

Objectives:

• Complete a rough draft of something every week. (Nope. Not even close. In fact, I spent several months working on one traditional length short story. It was a situation I'd been thinking about writing about for a long time, so there's that.)
• Submit something somewhere every month. (I made 72 submissions this year. So, yeah, I nailed this one. Those 72 submissions resulted in 13 acceptances/publications. The most submissions done and acceptances I've ever had.)
• Increase my reading of short form work and journals that publish them. (Tried. Got a plan for next year. Plans are good.)
• Spend more time with essay writing Facebook group. (Again, nope.)
• Research changing membership at Medium and perhaps change it. (Did that, for what it was worth.)
• Take short-form writing workshops. (Took eight.)

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to agents

Objectives:

• Continue researching agents. (Yes. This is so tedious. I read about people who submit to a hundred agents for a project. How? They find that many people interested in their genre, age group, etc.? Because I don't.)
• Write a submission letter. (Yup.)
• Make submissions. (Eighteen submissions. I also submitted other book-length work to 13 agents. I believe the last of those rejections came in this month.)

Goal 3. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

Objectives:

• Update the short-form writing links on website. (Done. But needs to be done again.)
• Provide social media support for other writers. (Yes, primarily for local writers, but also with the Annotated Reading posts. Also attended a couple of local author events.)
• Attend virtual events for other writers. (Didn't see many of these this year.)
• Be more organized about marketing own short-form work. (Define "organized.")
• Continue Original Content and promote posts. (Yes.)

Goal 4. 19th Century Novel, which is totally just for fun

Objectives:

• Research the fun stuff. (Well, I collected fun stuff.)
• Organize research of fun stuff. (I actually did that this past month.)
• Blueprint some fun parts. (Maybe in my mind?)
• Write bits and pieces, if they're fun. (A couple of bits.)
• Read more historical fiction and nonfiction. (Yes.)

Note that I had three real goals this year. My plan was to do more of certain types of writing by not spreading myself as thin. That did work, but it could have worked better.

Time Management Tuesday: The 2023 Recapitulation Post

It appears that I didn't do a recapitulation post for 2022, which makes sense because I was suffering trials and tribulations and disappeared from Original Content for a while. But things are much better this year.

So this is the tenth time over eleven years that I've done what I call a recapitulation post.  My whole recapitulation thing was inspired by an article called Out With the Old by the late Sally Kempton in Yoga Journal, which I can no longer find on-line. But Kempton wrote about recalling "things we'd accomplished," "changes," and "conflict," all of which seemed to me back in 2012 to be things that would be useful in planning for a new unit of time. The very next month, I used my first recapitulation post to make goals and objectives for 2013, and the two events--the recapitulation posts and the time-to-make-the-goals-and-objectives posts--have been tied together ever since.

So this year's recapitulation post is all about how I did with this year's goals and objectives. Goals, remember, are what you plan to do. Objectives are what you are actually going to do to achieve your goals.

What did I do this year?

Goal 1. Finish 143 Canterbury Road As An Adult Book

• I won't go over all the objectives for this, because I met this goal. Got a technical reader to read it and even did another draft during National Novel Writers' Month. 

Goal 2. Work On Adult Essays, Short Stories, And Humor

Objectives 

• Complete and submit something every month to a Medium publication I made 14 Medium submissions, which averages out to more than one a month, though I'm not doing the reading to see if I managed this on a monthly basis. I had 7 acceptances, which is one more than last year. However, this year I didn't get anything accepted off the Medium platform. But I had my most successful Medium publication to date, so there's that.
• Revise some short stories and essays, preparing them for publication. I think I did that with one piece, which did end up being published at a Medium publication.
• Increase my reading of both traditional and on-line journals--market research. Yeeees, though I could have done more.
• Spend more time with flash and essay Facebook groups. No, I just can't seem to get to that.

Goal 3. Revise An Adult Manuscript Called Good Women

• Again, I will not go through all the objectives, because I met the goal.

Goal 4. Submit Adult Books To Agents

• Submitted Good Women to a number of agents. Is anything truly a waste of time?

Goal 5. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

• Provide social media support for adult writers and continue supporting children's writers when appropriate, which means when the spirt moves me. Can always do more of this.
• Attend virtual events for adult writers, fewer for children's writers. Again, can always do more.
• Attend workshops for adult writing. Yup.
• Use NetGalley to support authors with new books publishing this year. This didn't work out that well this year.
• Continue promoting Original Content at Facebook communities, Goodreads blog, and X. Not making good use of that Goodreads blog, though I love keeping track of my reading there.

Overall, I made 31 submissions this year, both short-form writing and novels. That's one submission less than last year.

Next week I will use what I accomplished, and didn't accomplish, this year to plan what I'll do in 2024.

Time Management Tuesday: The 2019 Recapitulation Post

We're going to pause for a couple of weeks in our reading of Ultralearning by Scott Young to observe the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. This has become an annual event for me here at Original Content, one I look forward to. The end of a year and beginning of another are temporal landmarks. I love them.

We begin today with the recapitulation post, in which I go over my professional goals and objectives for the 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 next week. (Honestly, I'm doing this the second and third week of December. I'm not actually working Christmas Eve.)

Woe is Me. This was a year that should have gone very poorly professionally because of the usual family health problems we've had here for more than a dozen years now. In fact, in February I did only two blog posts because we had two elderly relatives with serious problems at the same time. We had a death in April and a protracted wait before we could have the funeral in May. I had Lyme Disease in July, which wasn't all that bad, though I did spend a lot of time watching Netflix on a couch in the afternoons and the whole Lyme and its treatment kept us from the short trips we were planning. We were planning short trips because we started house hunting at the end of March, and that has gone very poorly. Very, very poorly. I will not get started on that. Wait. I just did.

In spite of all that, I stayed on task pretty well with my goals and objectives. And that is why you should have them, people. When the going got tough, and I didn't feel up to a lot, I had objectives/tasks in mind that I could choose from. I didn't have to struggle to come up with all new projects. I will be doing a specific blog post on this next year.

How Did Gail Do In 2019?

Goal 1. Work on short-form writing, essays and short stories. I was aware that one of our family members was very ill and thought, under the circumstances, that short-form work would be easier to manage than a novel. I mention this because it will come up with a later goal.

Objectives:

• Revise "His Times Or Mine" essay Have made good progress on this.
  
• Start some eating essays. Started one.
  
• Choose an essay or short story from the files or journal to do a little work on every day. Nope. Never gave it a thought. I did, however, do a new essay at the end of the year and got it to the point of submission. It's seasonal, so I can spend 2020 looking for places to submit it next year. 
  
• Read an essay or short story every day.
  
  Did very well with this, missing only 22 days, to date. Most of these were in the two months I was recovering from the antibiotics for the Lyme. I don't feel I got much from this every day experience. I have a different plan for next year.
• Finish reading "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf during retreat week (next week!), because it will make me feel accomplished and smart. Did finish this, though I don't know if I finished on schedule. I do feel accomplished and smart.
  
• Spend the last week of every month completing something. Anything. Yeah, forgot about this, too.

Goal 2. Concentrate on submitting completed book-length projects as well as short form work. I ended up concentrating on completing a novel instead. Nonetheless, I did 50 submissions this year, up from 37 last year. That includes taking part in Twitter pitches a few times. I had two agents ask for complete manuscripts for two different projects.

Objectives:

• Research agents at "Publishers Marketplace" Started with this late summer/early fall
  
• Research agents for adult books Same as above
  
• Pay more attention to agents on Twitter. Which is not stalking them. Not much
• Spend more time with essay Facebook group. Those people are publishing and share their work, exposing me to new markets. Which is not stalking them. Not much
  

Goal 3. Work on the YA thriller just enough so I'll have material to take to my SCBWI writers' group. I gave up writers' group for a big part of the year while we had sick family or I was sick. Got started with it, and this thriller, in the fall.

Objectives:

• Start by revising the material I've shown them. No one is going to remember that. Got great feedback when I went to them this fall.
• Work on blueprinting. Ah...But the "Ultralearning" read is going to help with this.
• Just work on scenes. Don't worry about connecting things. No.
• Read YA thrillers. Read several of these.
  
• Keep theme in mind. What?

Goal 4. Complete a second draft of Good Women by September. Completed it much earlier. Since a lot of it was a second draft with new material at the end, I found this much easier to work on during funeral planning/sickness periods than coming up with new short projects for an earlier goal. As I said earlier, next year I'm going to do a blog post about this experience.

Forget Objectives. This Is What I Did:

• Gave manuscript to Beta Reader 1. Made revisions.
• Gave manuscript to Beta Reader 2. Made revisions.
• Began submitting.

 Goal 5. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

Objectives: 

• Get started with writers' group again. That didn't start until fall.
• Continue with Original Content. Yes.
• Check out NESCBWI spring conference, with possibility of attending. Checked, didn't go.
• Check out NESCBWI-PAL offerings this year, with possibility of attending. Checked, didn't go.
• Be open to attending events for writers of adult literature. Attended a Connecticut Women Writers' meeting.
  
• Attend other authors' appearances. Attended at least 4.
• Continue with promoting Original Content at Google+, Facebook communities, Goodreads' blog, and Twitter. Google+ is gone. I was not as strong on this as I have been in the past, but kept it up, nonetheless.
• Provide social media support for writers/bloggers generating diversity material. Was very weak on this. Am planning to up this for January, since Multicultural Children's Book Day is the 31st.

Goal 6. Expect the end of the year to be a disaster. Don't fall behind on goals so that I have to struggle to catch up while dealing with the holidays. I also ended up planning to do short-term things in December, reading for instance. I've been doing agent research. I've been planning for next year. December has been great. (Well, it was great. A future blog post will deal with this.)

Checking In With Goals

For a year or two, I was creating a done list each Friday, with which I checked to make sure I'd worked on goals that week. I found it very helpful, but also a little time consuming. It was one of the first things I gave up last summer when that family member fell ill. This year I'm going to try to do it just once a month. I see I did this at the end of January. Totally forgot about it after that. If I had kept up with that, I would have been aware that I was slipping on some of the Goal 5 objectives and been able to pick up on them.

I mention this because, as I just said, it was helpful, especially with the social media goals. I would hustle Thursday night to get things done, because I knew I had to report the next day. You might want to try it.

In Conclusion

Now, yes, if you read this carefully you noticed that I didn't publish anything this year. And, yet, I feel good about maintaining a work life, at all. I am sure this is totally due to creating and using goals and objectives.

Time Management Tuesday (Sort Of): Welcome To The 2018 Recapitulation Post

Recapitulation! That time when we assess what we've done over the last twelve months in preparation for getting ready for the next twelve. I look forward to doing this, even if it leads to the knowledge that I've done less than I'd planned, because it gets me pumped for the new year. I love being pumped for the new year.

Recapitulation is easy, if you have specific and measurable (either you've done it, or you haven't) goals. And look! I had some for 2018.

Submission Boards (2017's, But Still)

Goal 1. Make Submissions Of  Completed Work Throughout The Year: I made 37 submissions this year, maybe 18 of them Twitter pitches, that resulted in one publication, one agent request, and a
few encouraging responses.

Objectives:

• Submissions to editors and agents from November NESCBWI program: Done. Reasonable responses.
• Research agents at Publishers Marketplace: Not as much as I'd have liked
• Research agents for adult books for Becoming Greg and Emma: Nowhere near as much as I'd have liked.
• Spend time at Essay Facebook group while on retreat in January: Done. Visited it during the year and learned of an on-line publication that I submitted to, which led to Heroes being published at Bending Genres. 

Goal 2. Begin YA Thriller: This ground to a halt half way through the year when a family member had a stroke the day after  Memorial Day. She survived, but the extra workload and, let's be honest, stress led me to dropping this goal, as well as going to writers' group.


Objectives:

• Finish character sketches
• Generate material for plot, setting, theme using Scott Turow Method, meaning working in very short sprints
  
• Read YA thrillers
• Bring material to writers' group each month: Dropped writers' group to conserve energy and then focus what was left on Good Women. See below. 

Goal 3: Generate New Work: Nothing to brag about here.

Objectives:

•  Finish a first draft of Good Women: I have reason to hope that I'll have this done before going out New Year's Eve. It won't be pretty. The last chapter and a half will be a lot of choppy blueprinting, and I realized yesterday or the day before that I need a new thread and maybe a new chapter early on. But I've been making notes within this draft for that, and it will be done after I've put the so-called First Draft away for a while.
• Do some work--any work--on this in January through March: Yes.
  
• In April prep for a May Days Good Women sprint (NaNoWriMo model): Yes.
•  Improve blueprints of new chapters: Yes

• Food essays: No
• External support for willpower essay: No
• Essays developed from workshop proposals: No
• Article on the recycling crafts in Saving the Planet & Stuff: No
• Research markets all year: Sort of
• Make essay and short story reading a priority: In fits and spurts
• For instance, on Retreat Week next week.

 

Goal 4. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

Objectives

• Continue with writers' group: I let this go halfway through the year. See above.
• Continue with Original Content: Yes, though sometimes at a reduced pace
• Start using a weekly social media calendar again: If I did this at the beginning of the year, I gave it up after May.
• Check out NESCBWI spring conference, with possibility of attending: Check out, yes; attendance at conference, no.
• Check out NESCBWI-PAL offerings this year, with possibility of attending: Did nothing.
• Attend other authors' appearances: I spent a few hours at the Connecticut Children's Book Fair
• Continue with promoting Original Content at Google+, Facebook communities, Goodreads' blog, and Twitter: The Goodreads blog hasn't had much attention, but I've managed to keep up with a lot of the rest of this.
• Provide social media support for writers/bloggers generating diversity material: Did nowhere near as much of this as I had hoped.
• Improve my use of Pinterest. It's not that great for marketing, but it's fun: The big thing I did with this was create boards for characters in Good Women and the YA thriller, providing them with clothing that fit their personalities.

Goal 5. Expect the end of the year to be a disaster. Get as much done professionally and personally before mid-November. Quite honestly, I felt pretty good about this one until I went over the above goals and saw how little I got done professionally before mid-November.

Not That Great A Year, Gail

Yes, I should feel pretty bad about how things went this past year. I don't because:

1. I can accept the realities of needs involving elders, an actual elder crisis, a new baby in the family, two babies in the family now, and a six-year-old. 
2. I managed a small publication this year, which doesn't happen regularly these days, as well as some interesting responses from editors and an agent.
3. I'm nearly done with a first draft of a book I've been struggling with for a few years, been thinking about for many years.
4. It's the end of the year, and I'm psyched for some things I have in mind for 2019. That's only a couple of days away. 

 

Next Week

A new year, a new set of goals and objectives.

Time Management Tuesday: The 2017 Recapitulation Post

Ah, Christmas is over. Hurray, hurray. That means that it's now time for recapitulation, something I've been doing at the end of December for five years now.  How good a job did I do meeting the past year's objectives and reaching goals? What can I learn from what happened? How can what I did last year affect what I'll plan to do next year? What does it all mean?

Once again, goals are what we plan to do. Objectives are the things we plan to do in order to reach those goals.

2017's Goals, Objectives, And Assessment Of Both

 

Goal 1. Adhere to Goals and Objectives 

Objectives:

• Set time frames now for at least some of this year's goals.
• Continue weekly checks of goals. 
• Experiment with using timekeeping app to stay on task  

ASSESSMENT: Didn't do so great with this one. It looks as if I set time frames as part of my goal making(see below), and I continued with the weekly check of goals until I gave it up in the summer when a family member had surgery. I did experiment with a timekeeping app. Not at all useful.

Goal 2. Generate New Work Through End Of April--Adult Novels

Objectives:

• Complete final draft for Becoming Greg and Emma.
• Finish a first draft of Seeking God.
• Blueprint new chapters. 
• I have a beta reader lined up for this manuscript
• Assign number of hours per week for each project, using timekeeping app to stay on task

ASSESSMENT: Not bad with this one. I did finish a final draft of Becoming Greg and Emma, probably before the end of April. A couple of beta readers have read it. I've done six chapters of Seeking God, which is now called Good Women, and do have some chapters blueprinted. That whole assigning number of hours a week for each project never happened, if memory serves.

 

Goal 3. Generate New Work, May Through August--Short Stories & Essays

Objectives:

• Food essays!
• External support for willpower essay
• Essays developed from workshop proposals
• Research markets all year
• Make essay and short story reading a priority
• Beginning with the first issue of my Carve subscription, which I've had for a couple of months 

ASSESSMENT: Total bust. Could become one of next year's objectives.

 

Goal 4. Make More Than 33 (last year's number) Submissions Of  Completed Work Throughout The Year

Objectives:

• Trouble at Wee Play World to list of publishers 
• Essay to P&W 
• Research deals at Publishers Marketplace
• Research regional publisher for The Fletcher Farm Body 
• Consider including brief market analysis with book submissions. 
• As described in Fall 2016 SCBWI Bulletin 

ASSESSMENT: I did one and three of the objectives and made 32 submissions, which is 1 fewer than my goal. Which is fantastic, absolutely fantastic, given how little I worked this year.

 

Goal 5. Marketing Effort For Saving the Planet &Stuff EBook For April, Earth Day Month, Targeting Specific Markets

Objectives:

• Create new slide show related to SP&S setting
• Take pictures this month
• Look into adding sound/narrative
•  Research ways to promote the slide show

•  Article on the recycling crafts in SP&S
• Research markets for it
• This objective would also support Goals 3 and 4, so...multiplier! 

ASSESSMENT: None of this happened.

 

Goal 6. Support And Promote Diverse Literature As A Means Of Helping To Maintain A Civil Culture

 Objectives:

• Blog Posts Related To But Not Limited To:

• Chinese New Year
• Black History Month
• Women's History Month
• Earth Day
• Canada Day
• Labor Day
• Native Reads
• Readukkah

• Provide social media support for other bloggers/writers generating diversity material

ASSESSMENT: I was able to keep up with this for about half the year. Maybe less. Definitely didn't make it to Canada Day.

 

Goal 7. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding

One of my most successful goals last year, in terms of accomplishing the objectives.

Objectives

• Continue with writers' group
• Continue with Original Content
• January--Cybils judging
• Check out NESCBWI spring conference, with possibility of attending
• Check out NESCBWI-PAL offerings this year, with possibility of attending
• Attend other authors' appearances
• Continue with promoting Original Content at Google+, Facebook communities, Goodreads' blog, and Twitter
• Continue reviewing environmental books at Amazon
• Research markets (Supports Goals 3 and 4. Multiplier!)
• Supports Goal 7, so another multiplier.

ASSESSMENT: Objective One! Two! Three! Five!...Yeah, this one fell apart mid-year, too. I don't even know what I was talking about with that last objective.

Well, it may not be my greatest year for accomplishments, but this year's recapitulation post is an excellent example of why recapitulation is so worthwhile. Some, maybe even a lot, of what I dropped the ball with last year, I'm thinking of folding right over into next year's planning.

Time Management Tuesday: The 2015 Recapitulation Post

Before I start planning goals and objectives for a new year, I like to assess how I did with the ones I had for the past year. I want to know what went well and what I could have done better because that information should have an impact on the goals and objectives I create for the next year.

So here's what I planned to do this year and how well I carried out those plans.

Goal 1. Generate New Work: Complete a draft of the so-called mummy book

Objectives:

• Commit the bulk of each week's work to this project for the first quarter of the year.
• Revise the first nine chapters that I completed last year in order to bring myself up to speed with this project.
• Plan scenes and chapters ahead in order to speed up the work and make it generally easier.
• Plan scenes around action, character, theme, revealing new information, and moving story forward.
• Bring pages of this project to my monthly writers' group. 

ASSESSMENT: Well done, Gail. I completed a draft and am within pages, as I write this, of completing the second draft.

Goal 2. Generate New Work: Complete two to three short pieces

Objectives:

• Set aside a few days a month specifically for this type of writing
• January--Go through files and journals and pick a few pieces to work on 

ASSESSMENT: Oh, dear. I was going to set aside a few days a month to do this? Not even close. I do recall picking a few pieces to work on. I do not remember what they were. I'm also quite certain I wrote up one of those pieces I selected. That's right, I don't remember what it was. I know I did a new, quick essay this summer. That went nowhere.

Goal 3. Generate New Work: Do another revision of adult Becoming Greg and Emma

Objectives:

• Shoot for starting this in June. A summer unit. 

ASSESSMENT: Nope.

Goal 4. Make submissions

Objectives:

• Submit The Fletcher Farm Body to a specific editor by the end of January.
• Commit a few units of time every Friday (limiting this kind of work to Fridays) to researching short story/essay markets.
• Maintain a Friday Marketing Research file in journal to speed up work on preceding objective.
• Submit a short work every month to avoid binge research/submissions. (Binging takes time away from writing and requires a big effort to bring myself back up to speed with the writing projects I've put aside in order to binge.)
• Follow short story writers and essayists on Twitter to note where they are publishing.
• Begin agent search for Becoming Greg and Emma

ASSESSMENT: Wow. Those were some really good objectives. The only ones I formally met were the first and last ones. I have a folder in my journal with agent names and attended an agent program last month. Otherwise, I made five manuscript submissions and two workshop submissions.

Goal 5. Continue to work on community building

Objectives:

• Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar
• Get Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar newsletter going by March.
• Attend Marketing Your Brand (NESCBWI) program on March 7.
• As part of Friday promotional work, find new ways to promote workshops I offer. (I try to limit promo work to Fridays.)
• Continue activities with 10-Minute Novelists groups
• Continue building Twitter presence.
• Now that the Facebook Author page is gone, be more proactive with blog, content and promotion.
• Improve my skills as writers' group member.

ASSESSMENT: This one I did much better with. The CCLC is a monthly feature here, and we got the newsletter going this year. I did attend that program in March. I've been busy on Twitter and even started using Tweetdeck. Since dropping the Facebook Author page, I've been far more active on Goodreads. And I like to think I'm becoming a more experienced writers' group member, if not a better one. I did let the 10-Minute Novelists group go, though. Too much activity there. I also attended a number of author presentations.

Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook

Objectives:

• Use Twitter to make a presence for myself with groups with environmental interests.
• Continue the Environmental Book Club whenever possible.
• Look into taking book down from Barnes & Noble and Kobo to take advantage of Kindle. marketing for books exclusive to that company.
• Look into the expense involved with printing a paper edition. (This would involved negotiating with the cover artist, since our contract only involves a digital edition.)
• Check out 10 Tips for Selling Your Book on Amazon 
• Contact more bloggers/sites for promotional opportunities when appropriate. 

ASSESSMENT: Ouch. Except for maintaining a Twitter presence and keeping up (somewhat) the Environmental Book Club, I've let this one go.

Goal 7. General Marketing/Branding

Last summer I added this goal, mainly because I was spending time on things like blogging, tweeting, and Google+, which I felt was a legitimate use of time. But if it was a legitimate use of time, I ought to have a goal for it.

ASSESSMENT For The Year

I was only successful with The Mummy Hunters, community building, and general marketing/branding. I was weak on writing and submitting. This is a classic writer problem these days--writers have trouble balancing marketing/keeping their names out in front of the world with actual production so that they have a reason for marketing/keeping their names out in front of the world. I should have known better. What went wrong for me?

• I had big impulse control problems, which I described earlier this month.
• I didn't do quarterly check-ins with my goals, check-ins that required me to really concentrate on them, because I was doing weekly check-ins. So long as I could see that I had been working on any goals, I was satisfied. I wasn't paying enough attention to realize that I wasn't working on some goals at all.
• Personal Life: More family events. I ran two parties for big birthdays, a rehearsal dinner, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I am not a quick, calm host. A holiday meal usually means a couple of days of work for me. 
• Personal Life: More travel. Altogether, I spent more than a month traveling this year. That did generate blog material, and I do professional reading during those periods. But I'm not generating new work. 

Yes, things will be different next year. Next week, I'll discuss how I hope to make that happen.