2023

My 2023 Goals Vs The Reality

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments

It’s a yearly tradition for me to lay out my goals for the year ahead just before New Years Eve, and then almost a year later, refer to each goal and see how well I did!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

So, here are the 8 goals I set myself for 2023 and the results.

  1. Start releasing ‘The Day The Earth Turned’ series – Achieved! As planned I released book 1: Summer in June, and book 2: Autumn in October. Book 3: Winter is all set up and ready to be released in January, hopefully followed by book 4: Spring in March or April.
  2. Finish ‘At Night They Played In The Road’ (working title, I still can’t quite decide) and send to editor – Achieved! In fact, I recently received the edits from my wonderful editor and will start working on them very soon. I hope to release it around June 2024.
  3. Publish ‘Days End’, the third book in the Fortune’s Well trilogy – Achieved! The whole trilogy is now published and available in ebook, paperback and hardback!
  4. Keep adding to my new short story and poetry collection – Achieved! I haven’t added a lot and this collection is nowhere near ready for publication but I have managed to add a few new poems to it this year.
  5. Launch Chasing Driftwood Books – Achieved! (Sort of) While we are not ready for any kind of official launch, Chasing Driftwood Books is a thing in motion. There are now eight authors in our indie collective and we are currently taking part in a Christmas calendar countdown together. The website is in progress and our mission is clear. Hopefully this time next year we will have fully launched!
  6. Keep improving my vegetable plot and self-sufficiency in general – Failed! Well, mostly. Unfortunately, my vegetable plot ended up being very neglected this year, despite my good intentions. I have realised and accepted that I just don’t have time for it. I made the decision to take down the fence and start clearing it all away at the end of the season. I felt too sad looking at it. I’m not giving up entirely and I still plan to grow things out there. I am just going to be a bit more realistic about what I have time for.
  7. Keep Up with dog training –Achieved! I had no choice, really. A year ago Ada was a sweet little puppy who was only just starting to go for walks after her jabs. It soon became very obvious that she had a deeply ingrained fear and mistrust of the outside world and just about everything in it! Her reactivity as a puppy was absolutely terrible and I was truly stunned, wondering what on earth I had done wrong. We have done constant training since then, at home, on all our walks and with our wonderful dog trainer. She has been enjoying Hoopers, Trick Training and more recently Future Stars which is teaching her the basics for agility later on. She adores training. She is desperate to learn and please you; she just finds a lot of things very worrying. She is a lot less reactive now, thankfully. She generally won’t react anymore to previous triggers, such as cars, bikes, motorbikes, scooters, children, buggies, men in hi-vis jackets, men in helmets… It was a lot! Now it is mostly just other dogs and not all of them. Just the ones that worry her!
  8. Get fitter and stronger – Failed! I haven’t gotten worse, I just wasn’t able to keep up the pilates. I’m happy with my body and my fitness but its hiking I really want to get into next year!

I think six out of eight is not too bad and the two I didn’t achieve were not total fails. All in all it has been a good year in terms of writing and family life. Look out for next week’s post where I will set out my goals for 2024!

My 2023 Goals

~ ChanAtkins ~ 5 Comments

It’s New Years Eve and a fresh new year is almost upon us so that means its time for me to set my goals for the year ahead. I’ve been doing this for a while now – setting my goals and then checking them against the reality at the end of the year. In 2022 I did really well, surprising myself by achieving 9 and of 10 goals and writing way more than I had planned to. 2022 seemed to be the year I let myself write multiple first draft manuscripts so that must mean 2023 will be the year I polish them all up one by one. That is exciting but won’t leave much time for fresh new writing! Anyway, here they are. Everything I hope to achieve in 2023.

  1. Start releasing The Day The Earth Turned series – As I plan to release each book with the season it occurs in, the first book Summer will be released in May or June 2023. Apart from one final read through, all four books are totally ready to go and have been edited and proofread and sent out to beta readers. I am currently waiting for covers from my designer and one of the first things I need to do in the New Year is plan my launch for this series. I really want to put the effort in and I plan to spend some money on advertising, set up ARC’s and put together a blog tour for book one. Let’s see what happens!
  2. Finish At Night They Played In The Road (working title, I still can’t quite decide) and send to editor – I think this is achievable. This is the book I am currently working on as it occurs next in The Boy With The Thorn In His Side universe. In 2022 I wrote the rough first draft of this spin-off book, where two characters I introduced in book 5 of The Boy series, got their own book. Writing this was a long slog as it currently stands at over 170,000 words but I enjoyed it immensely. So much, that by the time I got to the end I had another idea for another book set in this universe. Instead of starting the second draft of the spin-off, I couldn’t resist jumping straight into the new book idea, which was essentially a crossover book, using characters from several of my novels. It only took six weeks to write and was totally addictive! That then set me off on another tangent as Leon from The Mess Of Me appears in this crossover book, so I needed to finally finish The Mess Of Us in order to set up his part in the crossover book. Sorry if this is confusing! Anyway, as I have already said, 2022 was the year I wrote four books in first draft so 2023 is the year I have to get them all scrubbed up to release! I am nearly at the end of the second draft already, which has really been more of a read through to remind myself of what I’ve done. Draft three will commence immediately after and will involve more serious editing, revising and cutting the word count down! I am not sure this book will get released in 2023 but I at least plan to get it finished and sent to my editor!
  3. Publish Days End, the third book in the Fortune’s Well trilogy – Sim Sansford and I have already released the first two books in this mysterious YA trilogy (Hangman’s Revenge and Project Pandora) Book three has a cover and is pretty much ready to go. It is with our editor at the moment so at some point soon we will have her edits and feedback to work through and then we can plan a release!
  4. Keep adding to my new short story and poetry collection – It doesn’t have a name yet, but after publishing The Old Friend in 2022, I carried on writing poems and little bits of flash fiction and short stories, mainly in response to my monthly request for writing prompts on my Facebook page! I don’t think this will be ready for release for another year or so but I will just keep adding little bits to it when they come to me. I think this will be really good for me in 2023 as I won’t get much chance to write anything new with all the second drafts I have to dive into!
  5. Launch Chasing Driftwood Books – in 2021 the community interest company (Chasing Driftwood Writing Group) I run with Sim released an anthology called Stay Home – A Year of Writing Through Lockdown. A multitude of talented writers and bloggers, including people who attend our writing clubs and workshops contributed to the collection. We published the book under Chasing Driftwood Books and we also published the first two books in our co-written trilogy under the same name. Towards the end of 2022 we had a meeting where we laid out our plans for this company. Essentially, we plan to create an indie collective of like-minded authors of various genres. There are four of us so far but in 2023 we hope to launch it fully and encourage more to join. As indies, we have struggled to get sales and reviews and we know from talking to others that we are not alone. If we join up and help each other, we can achieve more. Our aim is to set up an indie publishing collective with a website, newsletter and social media pages, all aimed at lifting ourselves and our fellow authors up. I’ll obviously explain this in better detail when we are ready to go!
  6. Keep improving my vegetable plot and self-sufficiency in general – Always on the list because a garden is a project that will never be done! At the moment, my vegetable plot is a in a right state, covered in weeds and leaves and saturated with rainwater, but there is still plenty growing there! I can’t wait for warmer days to get out there and clean it up and get planting again. I need a new greenhouse or two and for Christmas I got plenty more seeds to plant. It keeps me going. I can’t express enough how soothing and therapeutic gardening in. It makes me so happy.
  7. Keep Up with dog training – I’ve never put this on my list before because training my dogs can be a bit sporadic over the year. Obviously I do a lot of training when they are puppies and teenagers and then when they’re a pretty good dog I tend to let it slip. At the moment, Ada is coming up 5 months and has completed a Life Skills course. She is so smart and picks things up so quickly, that I’ve built training into our daily routine on walks and at home. It’s so much fun and really improves the bond between us. Jesse enjoys scentwork and tracking and hoopers but I haven’t booked him into anything for a while, though we do bits and bobs at home to get him thinking. Tinks is a bit old and tired for it all but sometimes she joins in so I let her! I love my dogs so much. They make me so happy and the happier they are the happier I am.
  8. Get fitter and stronger – Last year I started getting into Pilates again after a very long break. I just follow some videos on YouTube and try to fit it in three times a week. This doesn’t always happen and life being what it is, I sometimes fall out of the habit and let a few weeks pass by before getting back into it again. So, this year I hope to keep trying to get fitter and stronger. I want my body to be strong as possible I head into middle-age.

Well that’s it because I can’t think of any more, which is probably a good thing! I’ll check back on these a year from now and see how I did! Are you setting any goals for 2023? Or just taking it as it comes? Please feel free to comment! And have a happy new year!!