Goal Planning, Revising, and Words

Last week was a jumble of last minute holiday preparations and limited family and friend gatherings. In between I was able to get some work done on my goals, my vision board, and took some steps to the big revision to happen in January. Mostly though I enjoyed time with my husband and girls, all of us fully taking advantage of the break from normal routines to just be together.

I took a few hours last week to complete the writing exercises to help me find my word for 2022. I worked with a few writing friends and bouncing ideas and reflecting about the year together was lovely. Looking back at my word for 2021, culminate, and all of the ways it wound up meaning something to me was really cool. I had intended the word culminate to inspire me in my writing more than anything else, but it meant so much more to me personally than I realized it would. I let myself digest that and then moved through to think about what word was calling to me from 2022. I think I know, but I put it on the back burner to simmer while I took some time last week to reset my office space, which was very much needed. Then, when all of that was finished, I let it all be while I spent time with my family.

This week, once we’ve fully rested, I’m going to finalize my goal plans. Most of that involves setting up my calendar for the next few months and aligning what I want to accomplish with the time that will be available to me. My mind is resistant to accepting that 2022 is here, but I’ll work through it nonetheless. I really would like to get MS:TS completely revised by the end of March. I’ve got a good handle on the storyline and realize as I was looking through it that my biggest work will be in the third act of the story. I need to decide if what the characters decide to do, the final place they decide to go, is really true to the events leading up to it. The character could go to this place and it could look the way it does, but I don’t know that it’s a hundred percent true to the core of the story. My plan is to take some time with the plot of the story, smoothing out the wrinkles in the first two acts and then letting the story show me where it needs to go. That might also look like some short writing exercises with the characters in different scenarios outside the current story to give me a better understanding of their mental space within the story, but we’ll see. This upcoming week calls for a lot more rest and time with my family still, so we’ll see what time is left when I get there. 🙂

In case you haven’t been told today, you are more than enough.

Happy Writing!