I've been spoiled by Google Drive and Microsoft Word for a few years now. Those tools make it very difficult to inadvertently lose work by providing an always-on auto save feature. Gone are the days of an errant click or Blue Screen of Death erasing hours of work.
What does this have to do with my writing goals this year? Nothing! I'm just a little bitter that I already wrote this blog post once and I accidentally clicked the wrong option and navigated away from the draft page and lost all those words!
Shorter and sweeter this time: I set some goals for myself late last year and I've finally settled on a quantified writing goal for 2024. It's 500 words per week.
I know, I know, it doesn't sound like much. At that pace, it would take me four years to write another ~100k word novel. But it's just a minimum, and it's a goal I expect I will often exceed (I have so far this year).
I set the bar so low because I had some rough weeks at work last year. Rough, like I was so drained I couldn't imagine channeling energy into any authorial pursuits, let alone brand new creative work. It's possible 2024 will harbor some similarly tough weeks. And in those weeks, I think writing a couple new pages of material is still achievable. It doesn't have to be anything crazy, or even anything with a larger purpose, but it has to be new. So, no, shuffling around the words in Spacewalker for the ninth time won't count!
All that said, I've also set a very ambitious stretch goal for myself to finish the first draft of a title to-be-determined sequel by the end of this year. For a long time now, I've had an outline, worldbuilding, and even some draft chapters floating around. So I'd really like to sink my teeth into advancing Edred Starling's story.
But it is only a stretch goal and if I'm still working on it next year, that's totally okay.