Looking Forward

Happy New Year!

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions—of course I want to lose weight, exercise regularly, and waste less time on mahjong. In defense of mahjong, it leads to a meditative-type state where I often come up with good ideas. However, so does walking and that’s much healthier for me.

Setting goals is different. I do that every December for the coming year.

Three is a good number: Two personal and one for my writing. The writing goal comes first and involves the most detail. I set a modest dollar amount—a measurable goal that I can reasonably achieve by selling some short stories, by increasing book sales through better promotion and distribution, and by doing self-publishing workshops.

However, having a goal with no plan probably wouldn’t lead to success—and I want to succeed. As I considered what needed to be done, the plan fell naturally into outline form.

I have three objectives for my writing goal. Each requires certain steps be taken and each step requires actions. I’ll probably add actions along the way, but the direction is established.

This is what the outline for the first objective looks like:
My modest writing goal does not depend on luck. It depends on planning and sustained effort. Selling scripts or hitting best seller lists with my new novel will involve luck—getting to the right people at the right time. However, the actions I’ll be taking to achieve my modest goal may increase the odds of that luck coming my way, in which case I’ll happily exceed my goal.

www.sherimcguinn.com
www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

Motivational Boards

Each year I was in Arizona, a group of us would gather near the changing of the year and spend an evening with stacks of old magazines and glue sticks, sharing and enjoying our community as we made vision boards for the coming year. Some approached it with specific ideas in mind; I let intuition lead me to specific pictures and phrases that I then glued onto my poster board. Sometimes this clarified what I wanted in the coming year, sometimes it was just fun. But always, there were a few key words that reflected something I needed to work on.

Those key words made their way to my motivational board—a collage pinned onto a bulletin board that hangs in my workroom. I spent the better part of a day last week rearranging this board, printing out inspirational phrases, reviewing everything on it. The key words from years of vision boards are still there, their prominence determined by how much reminding I need to incorporate them into my daily life—things like balance, focus, and process.

What’s not on it? Photos of my kids and grandkids—those are in another place in my home, not my workroom. They are enormously important in my life and always present in my being, but they are not the reason I write. That comes from the core of me that existed long before they were born. So the photos on my motivational board are of me as a confident little girl and an adventurous traveler. There’s also a striking headshot from my twenties, when I wanted to be an actress. There’s a newspaper clip I’ve kept since I was fourteen, about making the world a better place to be, and quotes that strengthen my resolve to keep trying. There’s a photocopy of the first check I received for writing work and photographs I’ve taken that remind me writing is not my only creative endeavor.

What else is not on it? Specific goals and my writing credits—I post my accomplishments for the past year and goals for the current in a different place.

My motivational board is about supporting who I am and why I create—the force within.

www.sherimcguinn.com

www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

Looking Back

In 2016, I made a respectable amount of money as a writer. I really wanted to make more this year. Instead, I’ve made virtually none. I felt like a failure, until I saved my “Priorities for 2017” as “Accomplishments for 2017” and edited it to reflect what actually got done this year:

I expanded the number of excellent critique groups with which I’m working on screenwriting, short stories, and novels. That was an essential goal and a major reason for my move to an urban area.

Running Away was shown in French-speaking Europe, then was released as a Lifetime movie.

The screenplay for Michael Dolan McCarthy lost an award, but I used their notes to make revisions. With feedback from two screenwriting groups, I wrote and revised a screenplay based on “Maria Angelica’s Baby” – the short story included in Saturday Evening Post’s anthology in 2016. I submitted both of these to the 15^th Annual American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. Results don’t come out until February. I also wrote a script for Frankie and Grace and submitted that and other scripts to multiple network writer development programs.

With feedback from beta readers, I did revisions of my new novel – the story of Peg, the mother in Running Away. Then I met and traded books with Sarita Sarvate and made major revisions thanks to all of her questions and comments. Peg’s Story: In Search of Self has been submitted multiple places. But in light of current events and the general rule that traditional publishing takes its time, I may decide to self-publish to get it out sooner. The character surprised me when she landed in the arms of a trafficker, but the ups and downs of her journey after that will speak to anyone who says “Me, too.” Goal for 2018: Fund an effective marketing campaign.

I sold books at the Citrus Heights Hidden Treasures Art Show, the Oakland Book Festival, the Gold Country Writer’s booth at the Gold Country Fair, and an author event at Book Passage in Corte Madera put on by the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA). I also attended the WNBA Pitch-O-Rama in San Francisco. I sent out a press release after getting a glowing review of Alice and saw a jump in sales of my books at Amazon.

That’s not everything, either. I’ve been tracking submissions and have short stories out all the time. I wrote a script based on one and the actors in the Capital Film Arts Alliance gave it an awesome table read. It may be produced as a trailer when I’m ready to publish a collection of short stories.

I didn’t make much money this year. In fact, after expenses it’ll probably be a loss. My projects didn’t come in first place anywhere and I didn’t get accepted into those writing programs, but I got good feedback from judges. With the input of good critique groups I produced multiple well-written major and minor projects. They’ll eventually be produced or published because tracking submissions and my time has made me more consistent. I’m even posting here weekly.

So while I may not have made much money writing this year, I did accomplish a lot.

The funny thing? In 2016 I did very little writing. The first half I was teaching full time with injuries, the second half I was living in my son’s living room with almost everything buried in storage while I had and recuperated from surgeries on knee and shoulder. The successes and income were from work done previously. So maybe next year…

www.sherimcguinn.com

www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

 

 

Reasonable Expectations

My to-do list tends to be insane. At times it’s grown to multiple two-column pages. That may be okay for long range planning or keeping track of little details, but when it’s multiple major projects it can lead to paralysis and a sense of failure because I never get it all done.

I’ve developed something that’s working better.

A couple months ago, I set up a spreadsheet to track the hours I spend on different writing activities. The first column has the categories: writing new material for blogs or promo; writing or revising stories, novels, etc.; research; routine business; new business; networking; critique groups and reading for them; marketing activities; and writing/editing for pay. I estimate how much time I’ll spend on each activity each day and the hours for each activity are totaled for the week. Then I’ll type in the estimate totals in a separate column and erase the daily estimates.

Each day I keep track of how I’m spending my time in a day planner, then enter those times into the chart and compare the actual time spent weekly with the estimates. This gives me a realistic view of how I’m spending my time and whether or not I’m maintaining an effective balance. I also can see when I’m pushing myself too hard or slacking off.

After the first week or two, I added two more columns—one to list what I plan to do in each area, and one to record what actually got done. The to-do list! Because I’d been keeping track of my time, I was able to come up with reasonable estimates for the time needed for similar activities and make this more reasonable.

One or two sixty hour weeks when a project’s near completion is reasonable (for me), but to maintain any kind of life balance, that level cannot be sustained. During the holidays, when family time expanded, the hours I expected myself to work on writing decreased. Since I know I do those sixty hour weeks, it was okay to have some short ones.

Thanks to this system, I’m getting closer to reasonable expectations for each week. My goal is to routinely complete everything planned in the time allotted each week and sometimes do a little more if time allows. Then I’ll feel competent consistently.

www.sherimcguinn.com
www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn