by Katherine Reay, @Katherine_Reay
Goal Setting
The New Year is a wonderful time to set goals. All those good planners with the beautiful clean white pages are just waiting to be filled with brilliance – exercise goals, weight-loss goals, quiet time goals, budgeting goals, work goals, writing goals… You name it and there is an app, a blank page or an itemized list system to help you accomplish it. I’m going to add a few thoughts here…
- Be flexible with all your goals. If you hem yourself in, you’re more likely to feel you can’t reach it when you miss a step. We all miss steps. So be sure to create those goals with a good dollop of grace.
- Be especially flexible with Writing Goals. Writing is a creative process. While there is something to be said for getting your body into that chair each and every day, actually sitting hours on end doesn’t mean the words will flow. During a writing project, my goals continually change… I work by word count goals some weeks, scenes other weeks, pages edited other weeks. Maybe the constant change keeps things fresh, or maybe it’s simply my way to quantify an organic process. Either way, try not to let quantity harm your quality or your experience when writing.
- Don’t have too many goals. I learned this the hard way – again and again. Some of those planners have spots for more than a dozen goals. I’m not sure we can give our best efforts to a dozen goals. I can only manage about two or three goals. I lose focus if there are more. I try to keep three in mind and look again at the end of March to assess my progress. Maybe one goal has become a habit and another can hop on… I only know that a stair-step approach seems to work best; twelve would bury me.
Have a wonderful beginning to 2019! It spreads before you with some writing already on the pages, but with a lot you can fill too. Enjoy the journey, set some great goals and be gentle as you climb to meet them. Above all, Have Fun and Write Brilliantly.
See you next month!
Katherine
Mary Davies finds safety in her ordered and productive life. Working as an engineer, she genuinely enjoys her job and her colleagues – particularly a certain adorable and intelligent consultant. But something is missing. When Mary’s estranged childhood friend, Isabel Dwyer offers her a two-week stay in a gorgeous manor house in England, she reluctantly agrees in hopes that the holiday will shake up her quiet life in just the right ways.
But Mary gets more than she bargained for when Isabel loses her memory and fully believes she lives in Jane Austen’s Bath. While Isabel rests and delights in the leisure of a Regency lady, attended by other costume-clad guests, Mary uncovers startling truths about their shared past, who Isabel was, who she seems to be, and the man who now stands between them.
Outings are undertaken, misunderstandings play out, and dancing ensues as this company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation, work out their lives and hearts.
Katherine Reay is the national bestselling and award-winning author of Dear Mr. Knightley, Lizzy & Jane, The Bronte Plot, A Portrait of Emily Price, and The Austen Escape. Her next novel, The Printed Letter Bookshop, will release May 2019. All Katherine’s novels are contemporary stories with a bit of classical flair. She has also just signed a contract for a nonfiction work to be published in February 2020. Katherine holds a BA and MS from Northwestern University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and is a wife, mother, former marketer, and avid chocolate consumer. After living all across the country and a few stops in Europe, Katherine now happily resides outside Chicago, IL. You can meet her at www.katherinereay.com or on Facebook: KatherineReayBooks, Twitter: @katherine_reay or Instagram: @katherinereay.