A New Year Resolution

It is a new year, and with it comes New Year Resolutions. My family has a tradition where we make a gingerbread house. We go around the room stating New Years Resolutions. After we say a resolution we get to break off and eat a piece of the gingerbread house. This is one of my favorite family traditions and one that gets me to New Years Resolutions.

Now, one of my goals for 2013 is to finish the first draft of the Sleeping Beauty spin-off that I am working on. When I set the goal I honestly had reservations about my ability to complete this goal, thinking that perhaps reaching chapter 10 of the draft would be a more reasonable goal (I'm working on chapter 3 right now), but I set the lofty goal all the same. The following Monday for Family Home Evening Jason, my husband, decided we should plan out how we were going to accomplish our goals for the year.

I was a bit daunted and overwhelmed by how to figure out how to accomplish this goal. In the past I have tried setting an amount of time to write. That didn't work too well and was difficult to track. I just wasn't sure how to do it. Then Jason showed me how he'd set up his goals. He'd split them up into steps. Do this in the first quarter of the year, expand on in second and so forth. That idea caught hold and my plan was born - start in the first quarter writing once a week, and then increasing the days of writing per week each quarter. I think this might work. At this point, writing at least once a week can be challenging with my busy schedule, but the two times I have sat down and written have been rewarding.

Today I wrote 500 words, bringing me up to 5,000 words for the manuscript. I also reread through what I had already written and made some edits. Surprisingly, I feel it is decently good. It's not perfect, but the idea and story feels solid to me. It is a story I've have bouncing around inside of me since high school and I guess now is its time to get released. I've never finished a manuscript for a novel before, but hopefully this will be the time. I've done a lot of thinking over the years, but not as much doing. To see my goals come to fruition will require work. Work I want to put in. I hope my commitment and desire will remain strong. This is definitely not a goal I want to fall by the wayside (though that is true of all my goals for this year).

Happy New Year!