goals

My 2025 Goals Vs The Reality!

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

What I set out to achieve this year and how well I did!

Hello everyone! It’s that time of year once again where I dig out the goals I set myself for 2025 and see how well I did. I always find this exciting because once I set those goals at the start of the year I do tend to instantly forget them! It’s fun to see where my head was at a year ago and what was important to me going into that fresh new year.

Let’s dive in, see what I set myself up for and see whether I managed it or not!

Goal No 1: Publish The Mess Of Us February 2025 

Reality= Achieved: Yeah, this wasn’t going to get missed was it? The preorder was all ready to go! An easy start!

    Goal No 2: Go through my editors suggestions for The Dark Finds You and prepare it for release summer 2025 –

    Reality= Achieved, sort of?: Okay, The Dark Finds You is released on 9th January 2026 so I didn’t meet the goal of releasing it in the summer of 2025. I did, however, go through the final suggested edits! Half and half?

    Goal No. 3: Publish The World You Gave Us through Chasing Driftwood Books 

    Reality = Achieved!: This anthology written by the children I work with was indeed released June 2025. I suspect that’s why The Dark Finds You got moved back several months! It was a hard slog editing, formatting and getting it ready for release but the kids were all so proud of it and we launched straight into another one!

    Goal No 4: Send Black Hare Valley Book 1 to beta readers and my editor 

    Reality= Achieved sort of?: Another half and half. I did send it to Beta readers if you count serialising for feedback here and on Substack? I certainly got feedback! It didn’t make it to my editor though so I didn’t meet that part of the goal. I’m now on the final edits before I send it, so I was close!

    Goal No 5: Get both Black Hare Valley books 2 and 3 to 5th draft status 

    Reality= Failed!: They were only in first draft a year ago and they are now in third, so I didn’t get close to 5th draft. I set myself a tough challenge with that one!

    Goal No 6: Finish the companion book I am working on 

    Reality= Achieved!: I just finished the third draft of this Black Hare Valley book the other day. It’s now book 4, rather than a companion book though…

    Goal No 7: Continue to build and progress Chasing Driftwood Books 

    Reality= Failed!: Honestly, this almost fell apart this year. I just don’t have the time I ideally would like to commit to it. We are still going however and we just posted a 2025 round-up on the website of everything we’ve been up to and what are plans are for 2026!

    Goal No 8: Continue to keep as physically and mentally well as possible! 

    Reality = Achieved!: I am still sticking with Pilates and Calisthenics in order to keep as fit and flexible as I can as I drift closer to my 50s! Still walking lots and pottering in the garden too. Mental health wise, despite the challenges of the perimenopause, I am doing well!

    Goal No 9: Restart my vegetable plot 

    Reality= Achieved!: This is one of the things I am happiest about. I actually did really well in the garden this year, especially with tomatoes which I have always struggled with! Considering I was giving myself a gentle way back in, it all sort of exploded. I’d say I’m even more into it now, even more obsessed with turning my space into a sustainable food garden! For the first time ever I got a piece of paper and planned my new patch. I researched companion plants and plants that hate each other. I took multiple cuttings of herbs and fruit bushes I already have. I put up a new fence and created an archway entrance which beans will grow up. I have also been making trellises out of old sticks and these form a sort of grid/fence structure from the old tires I have. It all looks quite quirky and I love it! I also planted winter seeds and currently have broad beans, peas and winter lettuces on the go! I created a keyhole bed which is a key-shaped raised bed (made mine out of old logs) with a chicken wire compost circle in the middle. The idea is the compost leaches out to the soil. I’ve got another compost in the corner and plan on adding a second greenhouse. I am genuinely so excited and I’m out there every day planning and sorting and preparing! I guess the lesson I have finally learned is that gardening starts in the winter!

    Goal No 10: Reconnect with nature whenever and wherever I can

    Reality= Achieved: I have continued to try to name nature whenever I can. If I don’t know the name of something locally I take a picture and look it up later. This year I have also become very interested in the benefits of herbs and plan to grow a lot more next year. I’ve been drying my own and plan to start making teas too.

    In conclusion, I failed two, achieved six and partly-achieved two which I think is pretty good considering it’s been a busy year!

    Look out for my first post of 2026 where I will set out my goals for the next year! Thank you, as always, for being part of my writing and publishing journey and for joining me here in my little corner of the internet.

    Have a wonderful festive period and a very happy New Year!

      My 2025 Goals!

      ~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

      Every year I set goals for the year ahead so that at the end of the year I can compare them to the reality!

      Image by Παῦλος from Pixabay

      I can barely believe another year has flown by so fast, but here we are. It’s time to think about what I would like to achieve in 2025, then at the end of 2025 I will write a comparison post where I revisit these goals and see how well I did!

      So. without further ado, I hope 2025 looks like this:

      1. Publish The Mess Of Us February 2025 – this is already ready and set up for pre-order so should be easy to achieve and is the first goal for me for the New Year.
      2. Go through my editors suggestions for The Dark Finds You and prepare it for release summer 2025 – The Dark Finds You will be the final book in a universe of interconnected books. If you’ve been kind enough to read all my books, you will recognise several of the characters. This crime drama storyline will tie up all their individual stories and issues and it was possibly my favourite book to write ever, so I’ll be very excited to release it!
      3. Publish The World You Gave Us through Chasing Driftwood Books – This is an anthology of fiction, poetry and non-fiction written by the children I work with within Chasing Driftwood Writing Group. I started it a few years back and got quite far but then lost it when my laptop died, so we had to start again from scratch. It’s looking very good so far but I intend to really push for content between January and April and then start getting it ready for a June release.
      4. Send Black Hare Valley Book 1 to beta readers and my editor – I am currently on the fifth draft and already feel like the next stage is beta reader feedback.
      5. Get both Black Hare Valley books 2 and 3 to 5th draft status – They are both in the first draft at the moment, but while the first book goes to beta readers, I’ll direct my attention to them and get them further along the road. They are both much shorter books than the first!
      6. Finish the companion book I am working on – I started this the other day. It’s basically a diary written by one of the main characters. There is a thirty year gap between book 1 and book 3 where this character is basically alone and sort of trapped. I thought it would be really fun if he kept a diary during that time and I could use it as a companion book. I also have lots of short story ideas for the Black Hare Valley universe. And it certainly is becoming another universe!
      7. Continue to build and progress Chasing Driftwood Books – This is the indie collective myself and author Sim Alec Sansford started with a group of authors. We were all in the same boat, struggling with low sales and reviews and low incomes. So we decided to band together and work cooperatively to get our work more out there. We only launched the website and the social media pages very recently, but there is lots we want to achieve this year.
      8. Continue to keep as physically and mentally well as possible! – I have dived in and out of pilates throughout my life but I’m currently in my longest streak of sticking with it and I’ve really started to see results. I started back in August and very rarely go a day without doing at least fifteen minutes of pilates exercises. I find it very relaxing and calming for me mentally and it has certainly helped with the age related aches and pains I was starting to feel set in. I will be 47 this year, and as I edge closer to 50 I intend to stay as fit and healthy as I can. For mental health this means pilates, writing and being outdoors as much as possible. Let’s see if I can stick with it!
      9. Restart my vegetable plot – I had a year off last year. It was stressing me out because every year I started with the best intentions and soon found I run out of time and energy. The vegetable plot would end up horribly neglected and I would feel disappointed with myself. What I did do was take down all the fencing and let the earth just rest for a year. I planted a few bits in old car tires and that was it. This year I intend to start small and slow and see how far I get. The whole area needed sorting and tidying so at least I have done that. I missed it a lot. I’ve just got to allocate time for it and that’s usually the tricky thing.
      10. Reconnect with nature whenever and wherever I can – part of this is my new goal to learn the names of things I do not know. I have a certain amount of knowledge when it comes to plants, trees, weeds, birds and wild animals but there is so much I do not know. I’ve decided to choose three things on every dog walk that I do not know the name of and then find out. So far already I have identified turkey tail fungi, wild honeysuckle, purple moor grass, Douglas Fir, Scots Pine, Spindle, rough chervil, celandine, sedge grass, noble yarrow, hogweed, sweet violet, common bittercress and a few more. I hope by learning to identify them and then sharing it to Facebook, I will remember them for good. I also hope to get out in nature and explore some new areas this year.

      So, that’s everything I hope to achieve in 2025! It will be interesting to revisit these at the end of the year and see how it went.

      My 2024 Goals Vs The Reality

      ~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments

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

      Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

      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.

      My 2024 Goals

      ~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments
      Image by Quốc Hùng Hầu from Pixabay

      It’s hard to believe it, but here we are again, tumbling wearily towards the end of yet another year with a brand new one just peeking over the horizon. The world does not seem to be getting better sadly – there seems to be more at stake than ever. But I will distract myself from that for now by following my yearly tradition of setting out my goals for the year ahead. I find it keeps me on track, feels good to write them down and it is fun to revisit them a year later and see how many I achieved! In my last post I wrote about my 2023 goals vs the reality. I achieved 6 out of 8, which I’m happy with. https://chantelleatkins.com/2023/12/09/my-2023-goals-vs-the-reality/

      Here is what I hope to achieve in 2024, writing related and otherwise:

      1. Publish the next two books in The Day The Earth Turned Series – with the first two books ‘Summer’ and ‘Autumn’ already available, it will be perfectly doable to stick with my plan of releasing book 3 ‘Winter’ in January and book 4 ‘Spring’ in April.
      2. Publish At Night We Played In The Road – this spin off from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series has been a long time coming. I first got the idea about four years ago, when enjoying the shows Supernatural and Breaking Bad. Those two shows gave me the idea of two co-dependant brothers (Supernatural!) trying to navigate and survive the criminal drug world they are growing up in. (Breaking Bad.) At the time I was working on The Boy With The Thorn In His side series and suddenly figured out a way I could add these characters, Alfie and Tom Lane to the series. I thought that might be the end of their story and introduced them in book 5 of the series where they find themselves entangled in main character Danny’s fight to escape the clutches of his own criminal past. However, I fell so in love with Alfie and Tom, I had to know more about them, and started writing notes in a notebook, even whole chapters, in order to explore their back story. The book was a tricky one to write, especially because towards the end the timeline crosses over with book 5 of The Boy series and I had to make sure the scenes were not too repetitive for anyone who has read that series. My editor has played a huge part in helping sculpt this book into something I am really excited about. I will be tackling her final edits in the new year and plan to release the book around June/July 2024.
      3. Publish The Mess Of Us – This sequel to my 2013 debut novel The Mess Of Me has just come back from my wonderful beta readers. They’ve been tremendously helpful and overwhelmingly positive and I can’t wait to dive in and do another edit of the book with their valuable feedback in mind. I’ll get to this once I’ve gone through my editor’s comments for At Night They Played In The Road and once that is done I’ll send it to her, bringing it one step closer to publication. I don’t foresee any structural edits for this one, so hopefully it will be minor edits and I can plan to get it published for autumn/winter 2024.
      4. Republish The Mess Of Me with updates and new cover – Before I started The Mess Of Us I reread and updated The Mess Of Me and arranged a new cover. I would have set it up for an update but I have not had the time this year, however waiting to coincide its update with the release of its sequel is probably a good idea!
      5. Send The Dark Finds You to beta readers – this book is now ready for beta reader feedback. This book wasn’t meant to happen, but writing The Mess Of Us, and At Night We Played In The Road gave me ideas for a crossover book and I just couldn’t resist. Many of my books are linked in the same universe, with characters and places reappearing in different books, and writing these two books which link up with previous books, led me to an idea that would neatly tie up everyone’s stories. Bill Robinson from The Holds End trilogy was already linked to Elliot Pie from Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature as they are neighbours on the same estate and are briefly mentioned in each other’s books. In The Dark Finds You, Elliot’s mum is now with Bill’s dad and they are expecting a baby together, making Elliot and Bill almost brothers. The main story-line involves Elliot’s best friend Finn being missing. Leah (Elliot’s other friend) and Laura (Elliot’s mother) are also in the book and have chapters from their points of view. Bill is on a downwards spiral as his addiction problems from The Holds End trilogy are still an issue, but he cares about Elliot and promises to help him find Finn. Bill’s band have a regular slot at Chaos, a nightclub owned and run by Danny, from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series… He also makes a small appearance in the Holds End trilogy and gets drawn into the search for the missing Finn, as a favour to Bill, who he has a lot in common with. Meanwhile, at the end of The Mess of Us, Leon (the main antagonist in The Mess of Me) has somewhat redeemed himself but is in debt to the drug dealers he used to work for. His brother Joe joins Bill’s band, and Leon is instructed to circulate drugs at Chaos, putting all these characters together in one book. It was so addictive to write because I knew all the characters so well! I don’t plan to publish it in 2024 but hope to at the start of 2025. It will be the final book in that universe.
      6. Continue to publish and grow on Medium – I joined Medium in April and I am so glad I did. I am extremely pleased with the earnings I’ve made from this writing platform and I find it to be a very warm, friendly and inspiring place. At the moment I am trying to submit 3-4 pieces a week and I’ll aim to keep that up in 2024.
      7. Launch the website for Chasing Driftwood Books – Chasing Driftwood Books is an indie collective started by myself and Sim Alec Sansford. It’s basically our own publisher! We published our Fortune’s Well trilogy under it plus our collaborative lockdown book, Stay Home. At the moment there are eight of us in the collective. Our plan is to support and promote each other and eventually let other authors join if they’re a good fit. The website will have all our books available to buy on author pages for each of us. I really hope 2024 is the year we push this forward as its been a long time coming!
      8. Tackle the third draft of Black Hare Valley – this won’t be a priority and will only happen if and when I get gaps between editors and beta readers getting back to me on the books mentioned above. Black Hare Valley was an idea I got about five or six years ago. My son helped me design the town with a huge map we drew together. I wrote some ideas and some character bios and that was it. Then, almost two years ago, we had a long power cut and an even longer time without the internet so I couldn’t work on the books on my laptop. I suddenly had the opening chapter to Black Hare Valley so grabbed a notebook and wrote it. Of course, this led to the next chapter, and the next and so on. I ended up writing the whole thing into five notebooks by hand and then put is aside to go back to the other books close to publication. Just recently, I was waiting for feedback from beta readers and my editor so decided to type up Black Hare Valley. This was technically the second draft but didn’t feel like it as I didn’t make too many changes. I just finished this a few days ago and will now leave it alone while I get all the other books ready for release. I have had some extra ideas for the plot though, so I added them to the end in note form and I am so excited to get back to this at some point!
      9. Add paid and free writing resources to the Chasing Driftwood Writing Group website – The site is now split between my writing group which provides writing opportunities to young people, and Chasing Driftwood Books which aims to support our group of indie authors. I’d like to add free resources to the writing group side. Regular prompts and challenges, as well as blog posts and tips and advice. I’d also like to add some paid resources such as some notebooks we have designed and some non-fiction books we are working on to encourage writing. I’m not sure if I will get time for this but I had to add it to the list to try and keep me on track!
      10. Get into hiking – We recently bought a caravan in Ilfracombe, Devon, which is close to the South West Salt path and Exmoor. It’s a beautifully wild and rugged coastal environment and I’ve had a strong urge to get into hiking for a while now. I just bought myself hiking boots with some Christmas money and I am so excited to get started! I am longing for adventures and keen to explore the area more as its just so beautiful.

      That is a challenging list and I might not achieve them all but I always find it helps me to write my goals down so that I can refer back to them and try to stay on track. I’m excited about all of them and looking forward to a brand new year of writing, publishing and adventures.

      What about you? Any hopes for the year ahead? Are you setting yourself any goals?