Happy New Year! I hope your holiday was fantastic, and didn’t involve, I don’t know, your first trip to the ER in 25 years or something like that (yay! Pleurisy!). I love a fresh beginning (and a clear bill of health 🙂 ), but I don’t particularly feel inclined to make New Year’s Resolutions (basically ever). However, I do have big plans for this year.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve really become devoted to scheduling to help achieve my goals easily, and this year is no different.

Blog schedule in 2013!

Last year, I created a blog schedule with themed days, which I sometimes even stuck to. Each month, I’d write out post ideas for each of those days. This made blogging pretty easy! So I’ll try to continue that pattern this year, but I’m changing up my days a bit. In 2013, we’ll look at:

• Mondays: ups & downs of the writing life
• Tuesdays: the Neverending TBR pile
• Wednesdays: Writing craft
• Thursdays: TBA
• Fridays: all kinds of fun

I’ll also be working on several writing guide PDFs this year, including last year’s marketing series, and updating some of the older PDFs throughout the year.

Writing in 2013

Naturally, I’ve got big plans in writing, too. I actually made up a day-by-day production schedule last month—leaving the end of the year a little open, but still. Kinda scary, huh?

If I can keep up with my schedule, I’ll finish two new books and a short novella this year. Unfortunately, I’m already behind in my schedule (I really hope this isn’t indicative of the future!), so I’ll probably be playing catch up a bit this month—but I’ll writing that novella and starting on one of my novels. My production schedule also takes into account lots of editing and critiquing—but I actually tried not to push myself too hard.

Writing slower

Yes, shockingly, one of my goals for 2013 is to write slower.

I wrote two new novels in 2012, in a combined total of less than six weeks. I kind of love letting my fictional worlds consume me, and I found that writing so much, so quickly had some definite advantages in quality (no, really!)—but also some distinct drawbacks.

To put it bluntly, writing isn’t my only—or even my most important—responsibility. I’ve got three small children, and I’m not going to plant them in front of the TV forever. So one of my most important goals this year is to be more careful about my writing time. I’ll still shoot for a decent amount of words when I’m drafting, but it’s less than half of my 2012 daily drafting goal. I really don’t want to spend more than ~4 hours a day on my work, and most or all of that while my kids are at (pre)school or asleep.

I absolutely believe you have to guard your work time—but novels aren’t the only things I’m working on right now, and I’m pretty sure my fictional characters can wait much better than the real characters who awe weawwy, weawwy hungwy!

What do you think? What do you hope to achieve in 2013? Come join the conversation!

Photo by Kotomi Yamamura