One week into the new year, and one week of goals tackled. It’d be easy to say I did great or poorly, but I’m stepping back as far as I can and trying to assess my progress this year in terms of efforts made versus efforts that could have been made.

Similarly, I’m also trying to give myself distance from my goals because I briefly toyed with the idea of doing a third Hundred Days of Blogging, but almost immediately realized that is a horrible idea that will only end in misery and sleep deprivation. Lord knows I need less of both of those things.

This past week, I successfully started writing Book 3, the final book, of the trilogy that started with Dissonance in Harmony. I’m making slow progress on it, but I’m happier because I’m not forcing myself to meet certain word counts or page counts each night. There are, at this point, no arbitrary goals assigned to the writing process for this story. I’m sure, once all is said and done, it will need significant editing.

I’ve put further edits of Dissonance in Harmony on hold as there are a few people reading it again, and it seemed a bit preemptive to start making changes at this time. I also just finished the second editing pass, so looking over it again so soon seems a bit counter-productive. That all said, I think it’s safe to say that one of my major goals is to publish Dissonance in Harmony before the end of 2018, whether by way of traditional publishing or self-publishing. That’s going to take a while, I’m sure.

My thoughts are to start each week with a fresh set of goals and complete as many of them as I can. I’m keeping track of things in my notebook, but I’m also reminding myself to breathe and not take those goals so deathly seriously that I find myself either freezing up or, worse, beating myself up over perceived failures. The point of all of this, after all, is to keep myself moving. Not to treat myself like a punching bag.

I’ve decided I need to focus on finishing my NaNoWriMo 2017 novel before tackling any edits for Babel, Restored. I’ll follow the first round of edits on Babel by then starting the first round of edits on NaNoWriMo 2017 (which needs a better title still).

A lot of this, I think, is slowed down or relaxed because I’m still learning a new, and rather complex, role at work while navigating how to be a good father to my almost-seven-year-old stepdaughter, preparing for the second child my wife and I are expecting in April, and also trying to maintain some level of social interaction that doesn’t leave people wondering if I’ve died and someone’s been Weekend at Bernie’s-ing me through my day-to-day life. (If that were to happen, however, I would hope whoever is responsible for such antics makes them worthy of their own movie. Just throwing that out there.)

Wishing all of you the best with your goals. Just a reminder: even if you fall short, or perceive you failed, you at least tried. That’s a step in the right direction, I should think.

Oh, and stay warm out there, because this winter weather bullshit is just too much.