Year-end Review, ROW80 Goals, IWSG, a Tammy Interview!, and Harry Potter

oal time!

A new round of A Round of Words in 80 Days has begun (not to mention a new year).

My goals in January 2013 were to:

Finish editing Druid's Moon and share with betas
Done and done! Well, sort of (see 2014 goal below).

Continue querying Out of the Water
Done, a few times. No joy. Unfortunately, even this story needs more editing.

Start typing up Captive of the Sea
Started and finished! Now to print and edit...

Finish editing Rome, Rhymes and Risk
Hmm, I never got around to this.

Get some of my short stories fixed up
Done, and how! One of my stories was shortlisted for the Surrey International Writers' Conference Storyteller's Award.

Introduce some new tabs on the blog, linking to snips that I've posted and events I've hosted
Done! Lots of one-off snips there, including for our Stream of Consciousness exercises on the Forum and Twitter.

Scale back on Facebook
Done! I only check about once a week now.

Keep up with knitting projects Done, except I keep forgetting to blog about them.

Read some of the books I already own instead of buying more (ahem, especially the ones off the list of 180 books down the left-hand side of this blog)
Not going so well. I've got a year left to tackles that list of 180!

Tidy up the garage (full of boxes of books) and the library
Begun! I'm very excited about this. Give me another month or so, and the house should really look proper.

I like these sorts of lists because, looking back after a year, it's nice to see that I accomplished something, at least, even if I feel like I haven't gotten as far ahead as I like.

Which brings me to my Insecure Writer's Support Group suggestion: a brilliant idea from Terry Lynn Johnson:

The Good Things Jar

Isn't that a wonderful idea?

I'm going to start two, one for daily life, and the other for writing.

As for my current ROW80 and 2014 goals, I'm going to keep things simple for now: edit Druid's Moon further. It needs about 20,000 words added to it, some more tension in the character interaction, and a tighter ending. (I could add more about editing short stories, blogging about Tolkien, sorting photos, editing and querying other novels... But I won't).

Something coming up on Monday:

Yes! I was interviewed by Tammy and I survived!

Despite our snowball fight (you'll see!) I had a great time; if you haven't gone through a Tammy interview, you should definitely sign up!

Meanwhile, I've been rereading all the Harry Potter books, again.

J. K. Rowling recently gave an interview on the 15th anniversary of the books:

   

I was catching up on the latest news on her website (wish I had time to play in the Pottermore world!) and realised she's also a very good non-fiction writer. Read Rowling's essays on her foundation Lumos, on her mother and MS, and on her views of government and benefits in the UK, they're worth it.

Have you set goals for the new year?

Which books do you reread?