It’s the end of March! And wild success of success: I met all of my quarterly goals🎉✨.
This is a first for me, I make my goal sheets to be a little bit of a stretch so that I don’t feel bad for not meeting all of them. They’re meant to be kind of aspirational while also addressing stuff I need to do so that nothing slides to the back of the proverbial drawer for me to pull out two years later and sheepishly blow the dust off.
My achievements this quarter have been finishing two major projects, adding ten thousand words to the haunted house novel, and consistently keeping the website and Patreon updated with my activities! I’ve also started noting what the revision of both the Immortal Rose and the haunted house novel are going to look like, which is exciting. Gold stars all round.
So let’s talk about next quarter—April through June.
My loose quarterly outline from the start of year has me drafting queries and doing draft continuations, but I’m shaking it up a bit because since January I’ve made new decisions on both next year’s posting and this year’s major novel. So, my major goals for Q2 are as follows:
- Finish the haunted house novel (previously ‘continue’, but my outline assessment has me falling short of my initial word count estimate, so I’d like to knock it out to get into developmental revisions for Q3)
- Outline the Part Timer (next novel)
- Revise Cinderella (Next year’s posting is going to be two fairytale retellings!)
- Start drafting Hansel & Gretel
- Read the Immortal Rose draft (previously revise! I want to take this a little slower so I can give the manuscript the time it deserves)
- Monthly update blogs for April, May & June.
At first blush this looks like a lot more, especially given that April and May are usually the busiest months of my year, but most of them are pretty low key. The real challenge will be finishing the haunted house novel, but now that I’m not worried about any of the larger projects hanging over my head, I’m confident I can meet it.
Huge thanks to my writing friends Miranda Harvey and Ash Spring for their support this quarter (and always)! I hit the last of my major goals at one of our weekends, and I’m so excited to see the progress on their next projects as well.
I hope everyone’s having a good time going into April!
Rory Banks 