GOALS

I know most of you set New Year Resolutions or Goals about six weeks ago. So did I, in a way. I mentally decided in my head what I wanted from 2011. But I never wrote anything down. Which is odd because I've always been very GOAL oriented and a visual person.

When I sold Christmas Around the World, House of Lloyd, and UndercoverWear Daywear and Lingerie I always made a big poster to hang on my office wall. The poster would coordinate with whatever promotion the company was having at the time. I'd have a big graph or pie chart depicting what I needed in sales per month and how many bookings it would take (based on my previous sales figures) to reach my target. For me, although the commission was nice, it was always about the INCENTIVES.

My first incentive with Christmas Around the World was earning a 7' Blue Spruce artificial Christmas tree. Live trees always made me miserable during the holidays so artificial had to be my tree of choice. If it was going to be fake, it needed to at least LOOK the part. That was 25 years ago. We finally retired the tree this year.

My other top incentive was a White Fox fur coat from UndercoverWear. I worked really hard to earn the coat. Then my mom got sick and I had to cancel several shows to care for her. My supervisor knew how bad I wanted the coat. She worked to earn TWO. One of them she sold to me over the course of 4 months at $50 a month. She made a little extra money and I was still EARNING the coat. I still have the coat but it doesn't fit the same as it did 15 years ago :-D It will again, someday. That is another GOAL I have.

So how do I go about accomplishing my GOALS? By breaking them down into manageable steps.

Take the coat for instance. I intend to be back in it by next winter. Where I'm going to wear it in the Ozark mountains, I have no clue. But you can bet when I get down to size again, I'll find a place LOL To do that, I need to lose 1 pound per week. That isn't a lot of weight in the grand scheme of things. But we all know shedding pounds is never as easy as it sounds. So I'm watching my portions, trying to eat healthier and posting my thoughts on another blog... Living Through Weightloss because it is about LIVING through anything we set out to do.

But what about my writing GOALS?

There are several things I want to accomplish this year. So today I'm going to list them. Over the next few days/ weeks, I'll break them down and we'll talk about progress.

1 - Finish rough draft of Winter's Peace

2 - Finish rough draft of Autumn's Healing

3 - Finish rough draft of Death By Design

4 - Finish rough draft of Gangster's Lady

5 - Enter/ place in Arkansas Writers competition (multiple categories)

6 - Enter/ place in ORA competition

7 - Enter/ place in Ozark Creative Writers competition (multiple categories)

8 - Get staff position with Scrapbook News and Review

9 - Speak to at least one group or conference (I'm scheduled for 2!)

10- Win Nano

11- Polish one of the rough drafts.

12 - Publish at least 4 freelance articles in the craft and/ or historical travel genres.

That should keep me out of trouble, don't you think?

In my next post we'll break the top 5 down into manageable GOALS with a timeline to accomplish each.

I'm counting on you to keep me on track. I'm always happy to return the favor. Tell me what I can do to help you.

Write like your life depends on it - for a freelancer, it does!