It’s been a week since New Year’s, right? Thank God. Now I can stop doing all the things I promised I would do.
All right, not allllll the things. But I think I bit off more than I can chew.
Here’s my 2013 goals:
1. Successfully participate in W1S1 (monthly challenge).
2. Participate and win NaNoWriMo.
3. Write every day.
4. Apply to the Clarions.
5. Read a short story a day.
6. Participate in the ‘Women in Genre Reading Challenge’ over at Worlds Without End: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/authors_wogf.asp
7. Write the play I’ve been planning.
Nice, manageable goals that don’t seem that intimidating when you spread them out over the year. But what’s tripped me up is all the reading I’ve promised to do. I’ve become a book club addict. There’s the Women in Genre Challenge, but there’s also the Absolute Write SF/F book club, plus the short story a day thing. Also, a friend and I have a little book club of two where we read classic novels (the bigger the better). So far we’ve read ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Les Miserables,’ ‘Crime and Punishment.’ For the first part of this year we’re reading ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ But before I can get to any of that I want (no, need) to finish Cory Doctorow’s ‘For the Win.’
I love reading, and even though I’m excited about reading all these great novels and stories it’s starting to stress me out. So yesterday I decided to say screw it. If I don’t read a short story a day, I’m not going to cry over it. I still like the idea of reading a short story a day and I still want to have read 356 short stories by the end of the year, but I figure I can always do it when I have time. Or I can find ways to combine them, like reading a collection of short stories from a female SF/F author.
I also plan on updating this blog more often, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.