New Year goals

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 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!!

My 2021 Goals

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of year again! And the scariest thing is how fast it comes back around…I swear the years are going faster and faster.

Anyway, before I start dwelling too long on my imminent slide into old age and death, here are my goals for 2021! And if you missed my recap of 2020, you can find out here https://chantelleatkins.com/2020/12/10/my-2020-goals-vs-the-reality/ how I got on with the goals I set myself at the end of 2019.

  1. Do even better in the vegetable plot – Improving how much food we grow ourselves was top of my list of goals last year and it is again for 2021. There are so many reasons why this is important to me but I think the main reason is mental health. Gardening absolutely saved my sanity during the first lockdown and home-schooling. It’s addictive. It burns more calories than just about any other exercise and getting dirty is good for you physically and mentally. I could go on and on about how amazing it makes me feel to spend time in the garden, but I think you probably get it. Towards the end of this season I extended the plot and I am still popping in there whenever I can to keep on top of weeds and to add mulch and manure. I cannot wait to start sowing again!
  2. Publish the next two books in the Holds End Trilogy – This should happen. Emily’s Baby and The Search For Summer are both good and ready to go. They need formatting for ebook and paperback, they need their back cover blurbs finalised and they need front covers. All these things are in motion and I hope to release them early next year, possibly February and March.
  3. Revamp and re-release Bird People and Other Stories – This little short story collection needs a makeover. I have already contacted my designer about revamping the front cover and my proofreader is going to go over all the stories after I have. This shouldn’t take long and I hope to re-release it in April.
  4. Finish and release my short story and poetry collection The Old Friend and Other Strange Tales and Poems (working title!!)– This collection just keeps growing and growing but at some point I need to call time on it and get it out there! I will get the same designer to do the cover so that it compliments Bird People and of course there will be several rounds of edits and proofreads before it is ready, so I hope to release it towards the end of the Summer, perhaps July or August.
  5. Start the second draft to my current WIP The Day The Earth Turned- Book One – I am very close to finishing the first draft and really hope to have it done by the end of 2020…so the next step for this one would be a second draft. I was tempted to dive straight into writing book two, but as this is such a complex and challenging book to write (more on that another time!) I now feel going back over Book One would be beneficial before I start Book Two. There are already bits I want to change, for example.
  6. Move things forward with Chasing Driftwood Writing Group – now that I have a creative partner, I am really excited about the CIC changing and growing in 2021. We have some exciting plans in motion which we will talk about very soon. Lots and lots of things in the pipeline – so I really hope that after the disaster of 2020 where thanks to Covid I barely earned a thing, I can finally start to see the hard work pay off in 2021.
  7. Carry on writing the screenplay version of The Boy With The Thorn In His Side – this is a project I recently started and it’s not a priority. It can’t be, with all the other things going on! But if I have a spare moment in the week, I do enjoy getting back to this. It’s really challenging and fun turning a book into a screenplay and of course, it would be my absolute dream come true to see the series turned into a TV series.
  8. Get better at promoting my books! – I have been shockingly bad at this in 2020. Sometimes I go weeks or even months without so much as tweeting a link. I really need to come up with a plan and stick to it. I think I will get a separate notebook just for promotional activities and ideas and make a load of lists to tick off. This should motivate me a bit more and keep me on track.
  9. Keep adding notes to other book ideas… – I was tempted to add ‘finishing some almost ready books’ to this goals list but I think I would be setting myself up to fail. I got over half way through a first draft of the sequel to The Mess Of Me recently but then decided The Day The Earth Turned had waited long enough and I wouldn’t let The Mess Of Us jump the queue….In 2019 I wrote the first draft of a YA novel with the working title We Hate The Cool Kids. I would also love to tackle a second draft of this but again, it will have to wait. And then there is the spin-off book from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series…in the fifth book I introduced two characters called Alfie and Tom. They took on a life of their own and I started to plan a spin-off book for them. I’ve actually written fourteen chapters of it in a very small notebook and they are always in my head! But no, no, no, The Day The Earth Turned series and my two collections will take priority in 2021! I have to draw a line somewhere! I will, however, keep adding notes to these books whenever I think of something. They are all very much alive and crowding my head and their time will come.
  10. Continue to Practice Self-Care – it wasn’t until the perimenopause set in last year, followed by Covid 19, that I realised how bad I am at looking after myself. I’m talking about really small, simple things – the small pleasures that calm you down and make you smile, like long baths with a good book and a drink of wine! I started making more of an effort in 2020 and I will carry this on. I will insist on time for myself in this busy, hectic life and I will make sure I get it.

So, that’s my list of goals set for the year ahead. I do hope 2021 is a better year for everyone. We can only hope! Are you setting yourself any goals for the next year? Please feel free to comment and share!

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay