I'm great at creating goals.
I'm horrible at following through on personal ones.
2025 is about changing that.
"The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week - it doesn't matter what the quality is to start, but at least you're practicing and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can't be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that's just wonderful." - An Evening with Ray Bradbury
He may know a thing or two as he published over 600 short stories and 30 books, among other works.
Basically, he's saying write every day. He wrote a minimum of 1,000 words every day since the age of 12.
I need constraints and goals to function and be productive. Without them, there are just too many choices, and I dream my life away.
I did this in 2021 and wrote 17 short stories using the Reedsy prompts. You can find them all HERE.
REEDSY has great weekly prompts. They'll even send them to your email to make it easier on you. You can submit them to their site for free or enter their contest to win prize money.
So, here's my SMART goals related to short stories:
SPECIFIC - I will write a new short story a week.
MEASURABLE - A new idea, once a week, between 1,000 and 3,000 words in length.
ACHIEVABLE - I've done it before, so I can do it again. And it's not to perfection, it's to done.
RELEVANT - This speaks to writing each day and my purpose of getting things out of my head and on paper.
TIME - The completion date for each story is the end of the day on Friday.
2022 was a big year for me. Here are five things I changed that made my life better. Fueled by the constant threat of death and disability that the pandemic instilled in me, I had to act before it was too late. I felt a sense of doom that my life was being wasted, that I was merely existing in a stagnant pool. I envisioned living in my van if it got me back to feeling.
1. Planning - I decided to make the following changes without knowing how I would accomplish them and without any guarantees. After YEARS of thinking about what I would change, I realized I'd get there. I used the SMART method to set my goals. Lots of deep breaths and forcing down fear were involved.
2. Finances - I took an honest look at my money situation and realized I was getting poorer as time passed. I made a budget, cut out what I could live without, and finally faced my fear of money. We never discussed money growing up, it was in poor taste to do so, and a particular shame was attached to it.
3. House - Related to #2. I took advantage of the market in the spring. I had felt a duty to keep it, but it was too big, too expensive, and going to waste in our ownership. Selling it was like cutting an anchor loose.
4. Work - Because of #2 and #3, I could retire. I thought for sure I'd work for someone else until the day I died because of all of my perceived obligations. Only slackers don't have jobs. lol
5. Family - I lived in New Jersey for 55 years. Now, I live in Florida with my daughter and her family. I couldn't have made any of these changes without her. I always said she saved my life when I had her, and now she's done it more than once.
These are just the Big Picture Changes. There were so many smaller ones along the way this year, and some big ones I left off the list. I don't usually do a year-end review, so that's different, too.
2023 here we come.
