Every New Year I set goals for the year ahead, then see how many I achieved at the end of the year

It’s that time of year again! Time to revisit the goals I set for myself at the start of 2024 and see how many I achieved. And of course, the post that follows next week will be me setting out my goals for 2025!

So, how did I do? Here are the goals I set myself a year ago and whether or not I achieved them:

1. Publish the next two books in The Day The Earth Turned Series – achieved! Having published Summer and Autumn in 2023, I kept to my goal of publishing the next two books in this series in Winter and Spring. Achieved!
2. Publish At Night We Played In The Road –  achieved! I published this spin off book from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series in November 2024!
3. Publish The Mess Of Us – not achieved but the preorder is now live and the book will be released February 2025. I decided to space the books out a bit and publishing this in 2024 so close to At Night We Played In The Road would have been too hectic.
4. Republish The Mess Of Me with updates and new cover – achieved! New edit, new cover, done!
5. Send The Dark Finds You to beta readers – achieved – sort of! I am actually so confident about this book I don’t think it needs beta readers, so I sent it to my wonderful editor/proofreader to see what she thought instead. She had some feedback which I plan to work on early next year and then I will publish this one summer 2025 after further edits.
6. Continue to publish and grow on Medium – achieved! Although at the moment it is doing my head in but more on that another day! I have continued to publish and have only had one month when I didn’t get boosted. I am super proud of this. I even launched my own tiny publication in August, The Wild Writers Club.
7. Launch the website for Chasing Driftwood Books – achieved! Chasing Driftwood Books is an indie collective started by myself and Sim Alec Sansford. It’s basically our own publisher! We finally finished the website and launched in the summer of 2024.
8. Tackle the third draft of Black Hare Valley – achieved! And then some! I have just started the fifth draft of Black Hare Valley Book 1 1996, yes, that’s right, there are now three! So, I didn’t just work on the first one, I wrote the second, 1966 and the third, 2026 and they are both currently in first draft status.
9. Add paid and free writing resources to the Chasing Driftwood Writing Group website – achieved! This site now has free resources for young writers and I continue to add to it when I can.
10. Get into hiking – achieved, sort of! We’ve visited Devon multiple times this year and every visit has seen us exploring new areas, so I guess I achieved it, but I would have liked to also hike in some other areas.

I’m really happy with what I achieved and I am so glad I set the goals every years and then check them. It’s often too easy to get stressed out and bogged down by life and work and feel like you’re not really achieving anything. This is my way of reminding myself what I set out to do and I am always surprised by the amount I get done.

I won’t post again until after Christmas so I’d like to wish all my followers a wonderful festive period doing whatever you enjoy with the people you love!

Thank you so much for reading my work and supporting me in 2024.