New Year: 2025

Welcome to 2025 everyone!

We have arrived at one of my favorite times of year: a moment to take stock, evaluate, and plan ahead. I love this moment—which also comes around birthday times—because it helps me get my bearings. I get a chance to peruse my internal map, attempt to gauge the distance between where I am and where I want to be, and then figure out pathways to close the gap. Sometimes this overwhelming. I look around the topography of my life and wonder how did things go so sideways?

I try not to let these thoughts overwhelm me and remind myself that shit happens. Then I tell myself, right here, right now, on January 1st (I know this is the 2nd, shut up) that shit doesn’t matter. Now is my chance to evaluate what I did last year and sort out what I want to aim for in 2025.

2024:

I learned a few big things from 2024.

First Lesson
I am human. I hate that about myself and I hate being reminded of that. But 2024 was incredibly stressful in about a gajillion different ways. I thought I could write my way through the stress. I thought I was a machine. I read many productivity books, and books about increasing word count, and organizing my life.

But I went through a divorce, suffered losses in my family, and in my health. I won’t go into details, but here’s the bottom line: You don’t get to go through upheavals like that and be a machine. Emotions will sideline you, and you simply do not get to move on from long term relationships—even knowing it’s the right thing—without emotional consequences. And the only way to get through those emotions is to feel them. And let them hurt.

You don’t get to upend your day-to-day and expect things to function perfectly.
Your physical health will force you to stop if you don’t take care of it.

There were mornings I woke up, said to myself “It’s time to write. It’s time to be creative.” And I just cried in front of a blank page. I was so tired from being sick, I was so emotionally wrought from All the Things, that my concentration suffered. Work was the only thing I could use to exert some sort of control over anything.

Second Lesson
My goals were ridiculous. The advice I always hear is to set small, manageable goals. I have just…never been good at that. Ask my friends. Sometimes I tell them my plans and they stand in for God and just laugh and laugh.

Generally, this tendency to overreach has helped me accomplish more, even though it looks like a failure on paper. For example, the year I set my reading goal at 20, I only read 18 books. The year I set my goal at 100 books, I read 74.
Both were “fails” but I clearly accomplished more with the higher, much more demanding goal.

Knowing this, I set my goals high in 2024. Namely, I was going to start a new supernatural crime series and I was going to draft and self publish six books in this new series. I set this goal knowing that between family, work, and friends, I’ve only ever managed to top out at two-and-a-half novels in one year. I overshot so hard that last year was the first time I grew a bit paralyzed and didn’t make nearly as much progress as I wanted.

Third Lesson
(Kind of an extension of Lessons 1& 2) Skills are earned. Learning takes time and effort. In my effort to be a machine and hit ridiculous goals, I decided that I would learn new skills. Dictation, for example. Silly me thought I’d just be able to sit down, read a couple books, do a couple exercises, and voila! I would know how to dictate a book in a month.

When that didn’t happen, I grew frustrated. “I spent all that time learning a skill!” I yell at myself. “Why can’t you just do it and go make a gajillion dollars dictating books and stories??!!” You can imagine the spiral that caused…especially being as I’m not a machine and was already navigating about 700 different emotions from my private life. Result?

Creative paralysis. More crying at the computer screen.

Now it’s 2025:

First, I have some resolutions, then I have some goals. And the two are different to me. I’m viewing resolutions as “ongoing focuses.” There’s no real end, these are just elements I want to incorporate into my life. The goals are the concrete “I should be able to point at this on December 31, 2025 as something I have done.”

• Resolutions:
• Acknowledge my human-ness. Accept I will not be able to do it all. Accept that I have emotions I will need to feel.
• Take breaks. I need to go outside and meet the sun again. I need to look at something besides a computer or phone screen. I need silence and alone time. I have a million creative ideas, but no time to daydream.
• Recognize my brain is part of my physical body—and I have to take care of the physical so that my brain (my favorite internal organ) has what it needs.
• Focus on my own work. I work really hard for other people’s creative projects, often to a detriment of my own. I love what I do—theatre is amazing, editing is the best nine-to-five I could ever have—but I want my own books out in the world. I even want movie scripts and plays produced. So I have to put my head down and fall in love with my own stuff again.

Goals (aka: the section where my friends will laugh at me):
I recently read that if you’re trying to increase your output, you need to work on raising your floor rather than your ceiling. So don’t set your goals based on always hitting your best. Set your goals based on the minimum you can manage and raising the minimum.

For example. Like, with the reading thing I talked about earlier. The lowest number of books I’ve read in a year is 18 (thank you Goodreads for making this data set clear). The highest number I’ve read is 76. So, if I want to work my way up, I should focus on the lowest and increase that number.

However, since I have so much data, I know that my sweet spot is actually 45-50 books a year without a lot of sweat. So because I know my own tendencies of overreaching, I’m going to make my goal this year 75 books, which means I should be able to hit 55-60, which is better than my average.

• My data for my other goals is a little sketchier so…
• Goal #1, track data. I’ll track all the creative words I write this year. Every blog post, every revision I do for work, every essay, short story, novel, etc. You get the gist. Thankfully, my friend Ali has a spreadsheet she gifted me, and I kinda-sorta used it last year. So I’m going to use that questionable data to drive goals for 2025.
• Goal #2, Writing — Two 75,000 word books of my own rough drafted. (This is slightly misleading, I already have 46,000 of one of these books drafted, so Book 1 is really just about getting finished.)
• Goal #3, Writing — One 75,000 ghostwritten book (already contracted).
• Goal #4, Editing — Edit 2 books. “Alaska Murder Book” and “Homicide Hotline Book.”
• Goal #5, Writing — Post 1 short story per week, on Mondays, through 2025.