Let’s talk about goals.

And a good day to you, and you, and you.

It’s the second month of the year and, frankly, I’m pretty happy with how my relationship to goal setting and productivity developed in January. Let’s take a look at the goals I set for myself for what turned out to be one of the most brutal and unhappy months of my entire life:

• • 4 ACOTAR posts Well, I didn’t make this goal. I made half the goal, though, and in a month where I lost my best friend and two relatives to, you know, death, I’m really proud that I got halfway and didn’t just get overwhelmed and shut down my Patreon altogether. “Wait,” you might be asking. “You have a Patreon where you’re currently shredding Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses to bits in sheer frustration, the same way you approached your classic Fifty Shades of Grey recaps?” Yes, friend. I do. And while I’m committed to producing two recaps per month, I really would rather do one per week. If I go at that pace, we’ll be done with the book in June, just in time for me to head off on my annual writing retreat to the Upper Peninsula and you’ll be able to vote on the next title while I’m gone. But that’s a larger goal. We’re thinking monthly.
  • 1 chapter TBCVT Here’s one I get a lil’ star for! I managed to post a chapter of The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp.
  • upload Bound in Brass I managed to accomplish this one, too! I didn’t have much of a choice, because once you put up a pre-order, retailers get real, real strict about deadlines. I put off formatting and uploading because of grief and ended up formatting and uploading while suffering from Covid-19. This has taught me an important lesson: no procrastination in times of plague. But I got it done and uploaded with time to spare, and you can buy it (if you didn’t have a chance to grab it before it went out of print for the first time) at Smashwords or Amazon.
  • 1 chapter In The Blood This is the book I meant to lightly polish and re-release. Then it turned into much darker erotic horror. Darkness didn’t fit with the theme of me surviving the month, so we can let this one slide.
  • 1 chapter Queen of Hell Slowly but surely, the follow-up to my YA novel, Nightmare Born, is getting written. I completed a new chapter and even went through and tightened up my outline.
  • 1 video Do you love Stardew Valley but wish you could see someone play it while being very, very high? Well, another installment of my Jenny Destroys the Wholesomeness of Stardew Valley series is up. I’m still trying to get to 1,000 followers so I can use mobile data to stream (and therefore do live tarot get-togethers again), so even if you’re not into my videos, hitting that subscribe button would be a huge help. I’m so close!

In the past, I would have looked on this past month as a failure, but as I said, my relationship to productivity is changing. January really had a lot to do with that; I was able to look at all the things I did get done despite the horrible circumstances and say, “this is enough.”

Here’s a little secret I learned: forgiving yourself for falling short of the mark makes you actually want to achieve your goals the next time around. This is what I’m trying to achieve in February:

• 4 ACOTAR posts
• 2 chapters TBCVT
• 2 chapters Queen of Hell
• 2 Crave posts
• 5 “episodes” of TBA serialized project
• 2 videos

Will this be a lot of work in a month when I’m playing Sister Mary Patrick in Sister Act: The Musical (playing for four performances February 25-27, tickets available here)? Yes, it sure will be. But I’m gonna try.

How about yous all? Do you have any goals for the month of February? Put them in the comments and come back and see how everybody did in March!

(PS. a side goal is getting that second promised free steampunk short story re-released. Mea culpa, it fell by the wayside with everything else that happened.)