New Year's Resolutions 2013

I've never made resolutions for the new year before. Gonna try that out this year.

My first inclination is to take on way too much, and make a ton of ambitious resolutions that will inevitably fail. My second inclination is hopefully more reasonable. I'll stick to the "writing" category, since that's probably the most reasonable.

Resolution #1: Novel.

I partly mean "finish my novel" and I partly mean "rewrite my novel" here, because most of it has already been written at some point in the last year and a half. But almost all of it needs to be rewritten, and half of what I've already written needs to be discarded. Such is rewriting. Especially when you're me, and using this novel to learn how to write (something which, I am told, is not necessarily recommended).

I'm dividing this one up by months. Fantasy word counts tend to range between 80,000 words to 120,000 words if you want to play it safe as a first-time author. I want to be generous with these goals, so I'll say 120,000. I'll divide that by 8 months, leaving 4 months to rewrite, to get 15K words per month. Divided by 30, that's 500 words per day. I could write more, but again, I'm trying to be generous with myself here.

* January: 15,000 words
* Feburary: 30,000 words
* March: 45,000 words
* April: 60,000 words
* May: 75,000 words
* June: 90,000 words
* July: 105,000 words
* August: 120,000 words
* September: Revise first 30,000 words
* October: Revise first 60,000 words
* November: Revise first 90,000 words
* December. Revise all 120,000 words

If I have to do another rewrite later, that's fine. Some form of rewriting is to be expected. The goal is to have a complete, polished draft.

Resolution #2: Twelve new pieces for the SCP Foundation.

(For those of you who aren't familiar with the SCP Foundation, the short version is that it's a collaborative writing website, based primarily around short stories in the horror fiction category. There's a large number of pieces that fall into the humor and general speculative fiction genres, too. I write and staff for this site. If you visit this month, January 2012, you'll find that the featured Tale on the front page is one of mine: "Recovered Data File".)

This one's pretty straightforward: one piece a month. Technically, I could write more: these aren't long pieces. But I'll also be working on staff projects for the site and writing my novel. And these resolutions are supposed to be generous. So a piece a month is more realistic.

Resolution #3: Work out.

(I'm vaguely embarrassed to type this one out.)

I'll say that the way to fulfill this is to work out for a total of no less than 15 minutes per day for 4 days a week. Any skipped days must be made up within a month. Can't cheat and do 45 minutes one day and count that for three days. That's a pretty low bar to reach, yes. But generous, remember?

Resolution #4: Blog.

This is actually going to be the hardest one, because for some reason blogging is the first thing I forget to do. That's why I'm setting the bar even lower: one blog post per day, three days a week. If I get to the end of the month and I'm way behind, I can write several per day to make up for lost time. Skipped posts still have to be made up within a month, though.

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And those are my four resolutions for the coming year. Let's see if I can manage to not break them. Hopefully the systemic way they're set up will help.