Hi all! First time trying this challenge. Admittedly 2024 is off to a rough start for me so far, but I'm still feeling hopeful that I'll be able to make some good progress this year. I know I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew when it comes to setting goals for the year, so I may decide to modify some of these later on to make them more manageable. I'll be updating this post with my progress every Sunday and on the first of every month.

My Writing Goals:

• Write a total of 180,000 words this year. I'm not planning on breaking this down into monthly goals, as the amount I write per month tends to be pretty variable. But it breaks down to just under 500 words per day, which should be easily manageable for me. For this goal, I'll only be counting words written towards my projects, not journaling/freewriting.
  
• Reach a 2 year streak in 4TheWords. I want to keep my streak going through all of 2024 and beyond, but since 2 years is the significant milestone, I'm making that my goal. I should get there at the end of October. Maintaining a streak in 4TheWords means writing a minimum of 444 words per day. For this goal, I will allow myself to include journaling/freewriting.
  
• Change the status of at least 10 projects, e.g. from "idea" to "unfinished draft" or "first draft" to "second draft." I'm hoping this will help me make some progress on clearing out the many, many unfinished projects I have floating around, but without tying me down to specific projects for the year. At least one of these projects should be novel length. Multiple status changes for the same project also count.
  
• Get my writing projects organized. Dig through old folders, find all the things I have saved in various places and get them all moved to one organized folder. Then create and maintain backups.
  
• Get a short story published (or at least make my best effort to do so). This will involve polishing up some of the completed stories I have, finding calls for submissions for anthologies or magazines that might be a good fit, and sending out a bunch of submissions.

My Non-Writing Goals:

• Read at least 12 books. I've fallen out of the habit of reading lately, and want to get back into it. Aiming for a minimum of six books from my piles of unread books at home and six new finds from the library.
  
• Use the Timelog app to track time spent on important tasks. For the sake of keeping this progress thread simple I won't break this down into individual categories, but I'll be using the timelog app as a reminder to devote enough time to housework, gardening, pet care, exercise, other hobbies, etc. I have a list of 9 tasks and a goal for the amount of time I want to spend focused on each every week. For the sake of accountability and extra motivation, I'll be reporting here how many of those goals I met each week. EDIT: After a few weeks of trying this time tracking method, I found it wasn't working well for me. Not necessarily because I wasn't doing the tasks, but because remembering to record them in the app was tricky and didn't provide me with much satisfaction or motivation. I'm testing out a new to-do list format now, and may either remove this goal or modify it if the new list works better for me.
  
• Complete at least 12 craft projects. I love making art, but have a hard time completing the projects I start. This year I'm hoping to clean out the stash of unfinished things and devote more time to doing creative things.
  

Projects

(word count updated weekly on Sunday. I'll be editing as I go, so word counts may occasionally appear to go down because of this, but I have a separate system for tracking words written. Bold = focus projects for this month. EDIT: regular word count updates have proven difficult given how scattered my writing is right now, so those are on hold until I figure out a better way to keep track.)

Title	Status	Length	Genre	Synopsis	Current Word Count
Bewilderness (working title)	Unfinished draft	Novel	Middle Grade Fantasy/Horror	An endless dark forest which can only be found by the lost, a mysterious masked storyteller, a prince with no name who feasts on memories, and two young travelers trying to find their way home.	58,040
Daughters of the Raven Lord	Unfinished draft	Novel	YA Steampunk Fantasy	A noblewoman's daughter and an orphan living in poverty find themselves haunted by the same curse, transformed into bird-like monsters. They must both decide where their loyalties lie in a world turned strange by stolen fae magics.	33,323
TBD	Unfinished draft	Short Story	Horror	A woman seeks answers about an experience from her childhood that only she remembers, trying to track down a film that terrified her only to find that it doesn't exist.	2,668
The Terran Broadcast	Unfinished draft	Novel	Sci-Fi/Comedy	Earth is reality TV for aliens, and the network just cancelled the next season. With the apocalypse looming, a group of unlikely heroes must band  together to save the show - and the planet.	6,599
The Inspection	Unfinished draft	Short Story	Horror	An FDA inspector finds more than just food safety violations in a seafood processing plant.	3,255
King Tide	Unfinished draft	Short Story	Horror	In an isolated coastal town, something inexplicable washes up on shore after a storm.	1,631
Little Boxes	Idea/Outline	Anthology	Horror	A collection of short and spooky stories, each set in a different house in the same suburban neighborhood.	0
Blight (working title)	Unfinished draft	Novel	Sci-Fi	In the midst of a mushroom plague, an interstellar freelancer's life is changed forever when he finds an alien child stowed away on his ship.	70,696
River's End	Unfinished draft	Novel	Horror	Seeking answers about a box of mysterious photographs, a reporter finds herself trapped in a small town where time doesn't pass as it should and strange creatures lurk in the fog.	TBD
House of Dreams (working title)	Second draft	Novella	Horror	A young woman returns to her childhood home after her brother's death and begins to have strange nightmares that feel all too real.	25,355
Terraria	First draft	Flash fiction	Sci-Fi	A Collector shows off their prize terrarium.	490
Stormbound	Unfinished draft	Novel	YA Fantasy	A young weather witch and her familiar set off on a seemingly impossible challenge, searching for the last surviving dragons.	TBD
A Song for the Drowning	Unfinished draft	Novel	Fantasy/Romance	After her ship is brought down by sirens, a sailor stranded on an uncharted island forms an unlikely friendship - or perhaps more than friendship - with the siren who failed to drown her.	0
The Emporium of Curiosities	Unfinished draft	Novel (series)	Horror/ Urban Fantasy	A team of monster hunters protects the world from the supernatural, operating under the guise of a tourist trap paranormal museum.	TBD
TBD	Idea	Novel (series)	Paranormal Romance	A pair of queer paranormal investigators and their pet church grim hunt down ghosts to help them move on to the afterlife.	0
TBD	Unfinished draft	Short story	Cozy Mystery	A story about tea shops and train stations, travelers seeking warmth on a stormy evening, and a father who won't let anything - even death - come between him and his daughter.	1,464
The Unlikelies	Idea/outline	Novel	Sci-Fi/Comedy/Superheroes	Living in a world where a small percentage of people are born with superpowers, a college student discovers that her life so far hasn't been as ordinary as she assumed. What she thought were normal hazards of life - being taken hostage by a different supervillain practically every other week, not being able to drive because a hero in a mech suit stepped on her car again - turned out to be a power never before recorded, a sort of inherent magnetism to others with powers.  Once this power is discovered, she finds herself attracting the attention of the League of Heroes and the League of Villains in a different way - both are very eager for her to join their side and help them track down or trap their opponents. She wants nothing to do with either of them, until she meets the Unlikelies. This ragtag group of people with "useless" powers seeks to change the world without strict labels of hero of villain, and though they may be small, they believe they have a chance of achieving something the Leagues could never come close to: peace.	0
TBD	Idea	Short Story	Horror	A mother uses make-believe games to teach her young daughter survival skills in secret, in the hopes that one day she'll be able to escape the cult she was born into.	0
Canvas	Finished	Flash Fiction	Horror	Two children exploring an abandoned house discover that something isn't right about the paintings on the walls.	100

Weekly Updates

April	Week 1 3/31 to 4/6	Week 2 4/7 to 4/13	Week 3 4/14 to 4/20	Week 4 4/21 to 4/27
Total words written	1590
4TW streak days	525
Total project status changes	0
Craft projects finished	0
Books read	Started The Secret, Book, and Scone Society by Ellery Adams
Misc. achievements

(Misc. achievements = progress made towards organizing or publication goals, challenges completed, etc.)

Monthly Updates

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

2024 goal progress

Total words written

6,385

14,248

6,681

27,350/180,000

4TW streak days

458

490

518

518/730

Total project status changes

1

1

1

3/10

Craft projects finished

0

0

2

2/12

Books read

2

1

1

4/12

Misc. achievements

N/A

Wow look at those tables! I’m so impressed by your thread. Welcome to WriYe! Always great to have new people join us. I am sorry that your year hasn’t got off to the best start, but I wish you the very best of luck this year and we are all here to cheer you on *waves pom-poms*

Welcome to WriYe!

And, yes, those are lovely tables! I look forward to seeing them get filled up!

First update of the year, a little bit late and not nearly as much progress as I would have liked, but hey, it's a start. It's been one hell of a start to the new year, but I'm trying to stay positive as much as possible. Being stuck at home with covid means more time to write this week, at least. One thing I didn't expect to have so much trouble with is determining word counts for all my projects - most of them are split up across many documents, many of which also include notes/rambling bits that will need to be taken out in editing, so there may have to be a bit of estimating until I have everything properly organized.

Sorry about covid. Hope you feel better soon. Sounds like you’ve made a great start! Getting everything organised is like the unseen hidden work - the 90% of the iceberg, but people only see the top 10%. So you are doing great IMO *cheers* Good luck next week!

Good luck with your 2024 goals. I love the sound of The Terran Broadcast, sounds like a lot of fun!

Thank you all for the encouragement and kind words!

Week 2 update - this was another rough one, with very little actually written. But some of that writing helped me get a project finished, which is exciting! Granted, it's a very small project, but in this case the small size was part of the challenge. A local newspaper has a 99 word story contest every autumn, so I trimmed down and polished up a flash fiction piece to exactly 99 words so I'll have something ready to submit this year. This week also gave me extra time for reading. The Secret of Platform 13 was a short one, but definitely a comfort read. I forgot how much I love Eva Ibbotson's style - her other books were childhood favorites, so I was excited to discover one I had never read before. Vassa in the Night is also highly recommended. It's a modern retelling of Russian fairytales, and though there were moments when I I thought the YA tropiness was going to overpower the story (the poor protagonist, too beautiful for her own good and caught in a love triangle between the Nice Guy and a dark and brooding motorcyclist) I was pleasantly surprised by the ending. At this rate I may need to increase my goal for reading this year (though I'm sure once my schedule gets back to normal I'll have to slow down significantly).

On to next week - here's hoping for more words this time!

99 words! Yikes! That must have been really hard. What an achievement *cheers* Good luck next week!

Week 3 update, definitely more writing done! I've recently learned that though I feel most excited about writing as a pantser, not knowing what's going to happen next, I inevitably get stuck halfway through, lose motivation, and don't finish the story. So I'm trying to be better about outlining and planning. This week I started an outline for my current focus novel - it still has a lot of gaps to fill in (several sections are currently just "exciting plot stuff happens here probably"), but I'm already starting to get a better grasp of the structure of that story.

This week's big distraction focus was on crafts! I started a project that I'm very excited about - a miniature kit to build a little garden-themed tea shop. I have another miniature project that's been a WIP for years, and probably will continue to be for years because of the scale and the fact that I'm building it all from scratch (it's a dollhouse-style Victorian mansion/museum, inspired by the setting of my Emporium of Curiosities project). I've really enjoyed working on that one, but it's definitely an intimidating project to learn with, so I wanted to try out a few smaller miniature scenes from kits to teach myself more of the basics and have something I could actually finish in a reasonable length of time. So far I'm happy with the bits I've made - the tiny books are so cute!

OMG you must have surgeons hands. That is so impressive!!

Very cute!

Let us know how the 99 word story thing works out? Please?? I would be interested in trying it myself, though I don't know where to send what I would write... But I wish I could do the miniature work you do!! My husband would never let me see the light of day, I'd be so busy building his game worlds for him!

Jan 28, 2024 0:13:02 GMT -5 auroralynneskye said:

Let us know how the 99 word story thing works out? Please?? I would be interested in trying it myself, though I don't know where to send what I would write... But I wish I could do the miniature work you do!! My husband would never let me see the light of day, I'd be so busy building his game worlds for him!

Aww, thanks! I highly recommend trying out a 99 word story (or other length of flash fiction) to any writers interested in the challenge - I think it's a great exercise in word choice and has definitely helped me build editing skills. The contest I want to submit this one to isn't until October, but I wanted to have something ready for it well in advance because it manages to sneak up on me every year. I'll definitely post an update when we get there, though.

I think the contest I'm looking at is only open to local writers (so unless by some strange coincidence you're also located in Humboldt County, CA, I'm not certain if they'd accept the submission), but a quick search found this list - www.christopherfielden.com/short-story-tips-and-writing-advice/flash-fiction-competitions.php. Looks like it gets updated pretty regularly and has a lot of different listings for places to submit short fiction, so some of those might be worth a try!

Week 4 update: the writing is finally picking up momentum, though admittedly not for the projects I promised myself I'd finish this year. Instead, of course, I have a new novel idea in the brainstorming stages (The Unlikelies), and it's all I'm in the mood to write. Ah well. Words towards new projects are still better than no words.

I've continued to make progress on my miniature project (so many tiny pieces of furniture...) but most of my time this past week has been focused on getting the house ready for the new kitten. My partner and I both fell in love with her at the shelter last weekend, and were able to bring her home yesterday. We haven't officially decided on a name yet, but we've been calling her Bee because every since we brought her home she's been purring constantly, buzzing like a little bumblebee. She's very cuddly and playful, and so far has literally only stopped purring when she's asleep. <3

 

Next week, I definitely have to spend more time focused on reading. I haven't done much of that these past two weeks, but I'm doing a book club this year with some friends and I really should get started on our first read.

No, I'm not in Humboldt...WNW of there, though... But I will look into it. Thanks! And the little buzzing baby is adorable!