November was a long month, and only partially in a good way. Obviously, the start of the holidays and the chance to see some family was great. It was also very busy for me at work, which took a lot of the mental capacity I might have otherwise had to do things I’d like to do at home. Also, our entire family has been sick to some degree over the last three or four weeks.

So, as you may have been able to tell by the extra haiku I posted in November, rather than writing full posts, some of my goals went less than well.

Last Month’s Goals

1. Read three books.
2. Exercise every day and go to the gym twice per week.
3. Write long-form at least 10 days.

Read three books?

Nope. I’ve finished one book and made progress on two others. I started listening to Black leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James on Audible, and it’s taking me longer to get into than I anticipated. I’m on chapter five, and I feel like I’m just beginning to understand what this story is actually like. I’m definitely going to continue reading it. It’s just taking me a bit longer to sink my teeth into.

I’ll probably end up picking away at other books during December in between chapters, just to stay on top of my reading goal. I need to finish one more book in December to meet my Goodreads goal of reading 26 books this year. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I will not finish Black leopard, Red Wolf this month, so I’ll finish something else to hit that mark.

Set my exercise/gym routine?

Also no. Again, busy month, and then getting sick did little to help my gym efforts. I feel like I’ve mostly been drained on energy the last few weeks, and I’m just now starting to feel normal again. I’m back on a more regular exercise routine now, but it’s been mostly yoga. I’m hoping to get back to the gym this week.

Write long-form at least 10 days?

No, and honestly, this goal was partially hurt by me not having the time/energy to write long-form blogs for a couple weeks. I definitely didn’t spend enough time revising New Earth, but I also just didn’t spend enough time writing or reading period in November.

I’m now nearly finished with this round of revisions for New Earth, and I’d like to have more specific goals for my revisions going forward. I’ll expand on that next.

Goals for December

1. Read three books. Probably in the form of shorter novels.
2. Exercise at least every other day and go to the gym more than once per week. I’m backing off last month’s goal a bit just to give myself some space during the holidays. Note that I’m saying go to the gym more than once per week. This basically means I want to average more than one gym trip per week. If it ends up only being six total, that’s still a win.
3. Finish current round of revisions for New Earth. This should be doable, since I only have 15 pages or so to go.
4. Create character sheets with physical descriptions/clothes for main characters. This applies to both Uprooted and New Earth, which effectively have the same primary characters. I’ve tried to incorporate this tuff organically in my revisions, but I don’t want it to feel forced, and I don’t want it to be inconsistent. So I’m going to create character sheets based on what I have so far, expand on them, and then use those to inform how I describe these characters throughout both stories.
5. Outline New Earth for chapter structure. This is something I did with Uprooted that helped me understand the overall plot flow better, and restructure chapters in ways that made sense for the story. I’ll do the same with New Earth.

Note that I’m not focused on writing a certain number of days this month. I have specific tasks I want to achieve, and everything else is bonus. It may be that this is still too much for me to achieve in one month, but it’s just a different tack. We’ll see how it goes.

Steve D