It’s 2014

Happy New Year!

It is the first day of 2014. I’ve spent the last week or so tidying up loose ends from 2013, and now it’s time to look forward to the next year. I was going to upload a picture of my cleared-up desk, but apparently when we switched to the new blog format, the uploader got upwhacked, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it is MUCH better than it was. I can actually see most of the desk surface. I’ll put up the picture as soon as we get it straightened out, I promise.

I admit to some cheating – a lot of the papers got shoved into a “sort this” basket and hauled out to the dining room for the actual sort, which isn’t finished, but progress is progress. I also appear to need to do the sorting somewhere where there is a lot of floor space, because working on the desk means the Karma-cat keeps shoving everything onto the floor, leaving it more mixed up than ever.

But the office is clean and picked up, for now. It won’t stay this way long, but it is well worth the effort to get things totally clear once in a while, and the start of a new year is a good time for that, especially since I’m not head down in a manuscript at the moment. Clearing my desk clears my head, which gives me a good place from which to look forward.

Planning for 2014 starts with looking back at last year – the things I planned to do and did, the ones I didn’t plan, and the ones that never quite got done. It also means looking at why things did or didn’t get done. A surprising amount of writing depends on other people, especially once you get past the initial production phase. It seems one is always waiting on someone to respond – beta readers, proofreaders, copyeditors, agents, editors, your Internet provider’s service department that’s supposed to be fixing that problem with the web site… And of course there are plenty of life emergencies that come from out of left field and throw off the best plans.

Then, too, writing is not the most predictable of professions. It is all very well to say “I will finish the first draft of the novel by May 15,” but that doesn’t allow for getting stuck in mid-March, or realizing on May 1 that you have to rip up twelve chapters and rewrite them from scratch. It also doesn’t allow for getting invited to contribute short stories to someone’s anthology that has a deadline of April 30, or for taking a week off to go to the convention that is looking for a last-minute guest because the one they asked is in the hospital with a burst appendix.

Having some kind of plan, though, helps keep me on track. What kind of plan depends on what kind of year I’m expecting and how much “hard landscape” is already filled in. Conventions are hard landscape; so are contract deadlines and production deadlines (like reviewing the copyedit and page proofs). Non-writing-related events with firm dates also count, like that family vacation my sister is planning, or that 5k walk in May, or the theater ticket series (yes, I can reschedule them, but they’ll still take up my time).

So the first thing I do is look at my calendar to see how much time I actually am expecting to have. Then I look at where I am and where I want to be, and I start with the lists.

I have two kinds of New Years’ lists, really, though I don’t always separate them. First, there are the resolutions: the ongoing habits I want to form, like daily exercise and keeping up with the laundry, that can’t ever be checked off as “done” because there’s always another day and another load. Then there are the goals, like getting the novel proposal to my agent. I try not to put anything on this list that I don’t actually have control over (“sell the novel” depends on the editor; “submit the novel,” on the other hand, is all my job, as is “finish the novel”).

This year, I have one novel to get underway – that means planning, writing the proposal, and getting at least a partial draft done. There’s a lot of hard landscape, and some potential deadlines that will materialize if one or more possible deals go through, so I need to have a range of goals: the ones for if nothing else comes along and I have all the time it currently looks as if I’ll have, and the ones for if all the deals suddenly happen and I’m swamped with deadlines and have three months less time than I’m currently expecting. Or, to put it another way, the ambitious level goals and the more conservative goals.

So that’s what I’m doing today: dishes, laundry, and lists of things I want to get done (and a much shorter list of what I can realistically expect to actually get done). And playing with the cats.