GOAL PLANNING...

First writing group meeting of the year, and after the general 'what I have done on my holidays' we begin the hard task of looking at the new year ahead of us. Firstly though we looked at the year done.

That was hard. First question was what worked for us, and why did this work. Hard to do when my first thought was 'nothing'...but of course some things did work. Some things were accomplished, even if they were not major things I was aiming for.

So looking back is always a good start to figure out where we want to head for the future.

The hard first step is often knowing what we want to focus on. I mean a year is a long time (although for some reason January has scarpered and we are 1/12th of the way through 2015)- so deciding now, this exact second, what we want to spend the rest of those hundreds of days doing, is a very hard task.

However, having a general idea of what we are aiming at is a good idea. 

The year I had no real set of items to focus on, I kind of floated through. I did a bit of this, bit of that, not much of anything. I do tend to do much better when there is something I want to achieve by the end of the year.

What I find quite difficult is finding something to aim for that isn't too easy. Deciding I want to write some poems is a cop out- I will do that anyway. But it's just as bad to decide on goals that are very unattainable---I want to have my two children's novels published by the end of the year.

I can not have that as a goal. I can aim to have my novels at a publishable standard, and have sent synopsis and query letters out into the world...but I have no say over whether anything will be published or not. Can do the best I can do, that is a goal, something that is within my ability.

So as this month moves on, my goals for 2015 are being decided. Written down, crossed out, decided on, fine tuned. 

And of course they are added to my TO DO list.

That is only the beginning though...next step is to actually do something.

Vicki