Renee Carter Hall

They say the first step of keeping your resolutions is to look back on what worked and didn't worked in the past year's resolutions. With that in mind, I figured I'd do a recap of my 2011 writing goals.

1. Finish at least one short story per month.
This worked pretty well until summertime, when I wound up focusing on my novel revision plus my Camp NaNoWriMo novel, and never got my short story rhythm back. It still strikes me as a very reasonable goal -- as long as I'm not trying to write a novel at the same time. That said, it's getting more and more frustrating trying to sell short stories to magazines, so I think 2012 is going to be more about longer forms of writing for me.

2. Submit to at least three markets on my "someday" list.
Accomplished this with no problems. Didn't get accepted by any of them, but at least got a couple of encouraging rejection letters that made me feel as if the goal of being published in another professional-level magazine isn't totally out of reach. :)

3. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords.
Done. You can find "Real Dragons Don't Wear Sweaters" both at Smashwords and in Amazon's Kindle store.

4. Work on my website (add bio, sample stories and poems, etc).
Websites are always a work in progress, of course, but as far as the website serving as an online portfolio where people can get a better idea of who I am and what I write, plus a way to find out where they can get more of what I write, things are pretty well set up. From here on out, it's going to be adding and tweaking, instead of flat-out building.

5. Create enough visual art/craft items to be able to finally open an Etsy shop.
This is the only one that I didn't get much done on. I did sign up for Etsy and even spent a few hours putting a banner together for the shop, but I only made one greeting card, and then art kept getting pushed to the side in favor of writing projects. I'd still like to get back into art again, especially the little sorts of things that would sell on Etsy, so I'm tempted to carry this goal over into this year. At the same time, though, I'm finding that art can be frustrating for me these days because my skills aren't where they need to be, and as much as I try to tell myself to just draw things for myself and get a feel for it again, at this point I feel more accomplishment and satisfaction by using my creative energy for writing.

2012 goals coming soon...

1. Finish at least one short story per month. Total completed: 1

The month of May kind of slipped by when I wasn't looking. Or, to be more precise, when I was reading and sending out submissions. >_< My current work in progress is being stubborn and taking a lot longer than expected to come together. I think I've figured out what's supposed to happen, but I still feel like I'm missing a piece or two.

2. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords. Done! Separate announcement coming in a bit, to cross-post to LJ. (Okay, okay, yeah, I uploaded that novelette today, not last month. But I'm counting it anyway.)

3. Open an Etsy shop. Next step on this one is going to be hauling the old printer/scanner/copier out of the box and seeing if it still works after a couple years in the basement, since it's going to be a lot nicer to use scans of my art and not digital photos.

1. Finish at least one short story per month. Total completed: 2 (Technically, I could say two and two-thirds, since I'm almost done with another one, but it's on hold for a few days while I figure out how everything fits together.)

This month's two completed drafts were ones that I've had in progress for... a couple years now, so it feels good to finally get them done. They need some polishing up, but the pieces are all there, anyway, and I should be able to start sending them out by the end of this month. One is a lighthearted fantasy piece called "Real Dragons Don't Wear Sweaters," about a pet dragon wanting to be a real, wild dragon instead of being cute and fuzzy and pink, and the other, currently titled "Best of Breed," is a somewhat grittier piece told from the perspective of an anthro female cat and explores the relationship she has -- or doesn't have -- with her male human handler.

I'm really happy with how "Dragons" turned out -- I love the characters, I love the humor I was able to use, and I feel like it's one of my best stories in recent months. "Best of Breed" has been trickier, and as I've worked on it I've had to keep shoving away the potential criticisms popping up in my mind (predictable, cliched, confusing, whatever). Whatever editors and readers wind up thinking about it, at least I've finished the draft, and it might clean up better than I think, anyway.

2. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords. Working on it. That two-thirds story I mentioned in #1 is a novellette/novella (depending on what its word count winds up at) called "Signal," and that's the draft I'm planning to be my first Smashwords offering (not counting a story or two I'll put up for free just to test everything out).

The biggest problem at the moment is that, while I know how I'll want the cover art to look, I don't have a lot of spare cash right now to commission a really good artist to do it, and I don't have the skills or the tools to do it myself (since I really want it digitally colored, instead of traditional media). But I'm planning to ask around, since there may be very good artists willing to do the work for less than I'm expecting. *shrug* (Another consideration is that I'm hoping to eventually make a profit, even a tiny one, from selling stuff on Smashwords, and the more I pay upfront for cover art commissions, the more copies I have to sell just to break even. I wish I had more artist friends...)

3. Work on my website. I'm counting this one as done. This was my biggest priority for March, and all the main pages are there now. At this point it's just going to be an ongoing project, adding things, tweaking things, improving layouts, and so on. (Eventually the poetry page may have poems on separate pages with internal navigation, and I'll be adding a few more stories and probably putting up PDF versions for download.)

My newest online project will now be learning how to navigate and figuring out what to do with my Goodreads page, where I just signed up a few days ago. I'm still learning how to use the site, but it looks like fun, even if it also looks like it has the potential to take up a lot of time if I'm really trying to catalogue everything I'm reading or want to read. :)

In a way, it feels a little like I'm putting the cart before the horse since I don't have a book to promote yet (my Goodreads author page is there courtesy of short stories in New Fables, an annual anthropomorphic journal/anthology). But all in all, I think I'd rather get comfortable with a place like that before I have something to promote, because I don't want to be one of those people who suddenly shows up in social media trying to shill their book seventeen different ways to anybody who'll listen, and winds up coming off as somebody who's just there to sell stuff.

Speaking of selling stuff...

4. Open an Etsy shop. No work on this one for March. It's hard for me to have enough energy to spread over writing and art both, so I tend to shift back and forth from one to the other.

Overall, I'm satisfied with this month. Of course I would have liked to get more drafts completed, but these were both long (and long overdue), so I'm still happy with what I've gotten done. At some point I guess I'm going to have to accept that I just don't churn things out as quickly as others do, except in rare cases where everything clicks.

1. Finish at least one short story per month. Total completed: 1 (flash, but complete) Would have done more, but the first half of the month was given over almost entirely to the Sketchbook Project, and then most of the rest of it was spent researching/planning a novella-length story.

2. Submit to at least three markets on my "someday" list. Sent a submission to one of those markets this month. Got a form rejection back, which was a little disappointing (I was expecting a rejection, but hoping for a personal one), but oh, well. Will keep trying them, and the others on that list.

3. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords. Nothing done on this one yet, though the new project might work for this.

4. Work on my website. Wrote the rough draft of my bio page the other day. I'm still figuring out how detailed/personal I want it, as opposed to just being something more straightforward and professional. That said, website building will kick into high gear next month -- I want at least all the basic pages up and running by the end of March, so it's ready by the time Bewere the Night is released.

5. Create enough visual art/craft items to be able to finally open an Etsy shop. Nothing on this one yet, but it's kind of on the back burner anyway. I certainly did enough visual art for the month, though. :)

All in all, not bad considering that I was frantically trying to fill a Moleskine Cahier with art up until the 18th, and then spent the rest of the month planning out the new novella. Once the first draft of that is done, I'll let it cool and get back to knocking out some of the half-finished short stories lying around.

Okay, it's a little early, but this year has sucked so much that I'm preferring to just skip the end-of-year introspection and start looking ahead.

1. Finish at least one short story per month. (This can include completing current works in progress or finishing something new. I'm still debating whether "finish" should mean "complete a draft from beginning to end" or "complete the story to the point that it's ready to send out to editors." I'm leaning toward the latter, but that's going to depend on how many rewrites, how long the drafts are, and so on -- so it might end up meaning the former instead.)

2. Submit to at least three markets on my "someday" list. (This is a list of, currently, about seven or eight markets that I would like to have my short fiction published in eventually).

3. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords.

4. Work on my website (add bio, sample stories and poems, etc).

5. Create enough visual art/craft items to be able to finally open an Etsy shop (once I figure out what to call it).