The mid-year mark came and went, almost without notice.  But I caught it sneaking past from the corner of my eye, and realized it’s time to revisit my goals.

I know you’re thinking I’m really overdoing it with the goals theme.  But it’s important to your writing career to know where you stand.

I’ll go first, and you won’t have to be shy about revealing your progress.  So, my goals for the first half of 2012 were:

          Add approximately 43,000 words to Novel in Progress (NIP)

          Research agents for the type of novel I’m writing

          Enter at least one contest per month

          Review at least one book per month

          Rewrite and submit at least five short stories or articles

          Post to both blogs a minimum of once per week

I planned to meet those goals by writing three hours each day, and planned to write a minimum of 500 words per day.

Okay, let’s see how I did.       

My poor NIP received zero new words.  A big fat zero!  How painful that is to face.  There’s a lot going on here this year, some ongoing projects nearing completion, and a new certification course taking more of my time than I thought it would.  I need to reassess how I’m going to get this novel finished this year, and how not meeting this writing goal affects my goals for the last half of the year.

Researching agents is easy, and I’m on track with that goal.  I do this research as I read for pleasure, watching for acknowledgements of agents in books by authors I admire in my favorite genres.

Contest score – three entries in six months.

Book reviews should be easy to accomplish since I read all the time.  However, out of seven books I read with the intention of reviewing them, only five impressed me enough to earn the review.

Three stories for Long Ridge Writers Group (LRWG) prompts were published in their enewsletter.  LRWG enewsletter published one of my articles about the Steampunk Holmes project.  My book reviews are on Amazon and Goodreads, as well as this website.  Novel Publicity & Co. accepted a guest post.  Emily Wenstrom at the new literary ezine, wordhaus, interviewed me as a Creative Careerist.  In that interview, I wrote about my average writing day.  Finally, a solicited article is scheduled for publication next month, in a magazine for a local religious group.  I think I met this goal!

I know I met my goal for blog posts.  After my computer problems were fixed, I posted forty-three entries on this blog, and twenty posts on Peacemaker’s Path.  Yay!  I’m on a roll.

From my assessment, it’s obvious that I need to schedule specific dates and times to work on the NIP.  I kept fairly close to my goals in the other areas of my writing.  For those, I’ll keep working the same way I’ve started out this year.

Okay, I’ve confessed my shortcomings and my wins.  It’s your turn to share how you’ve met your goals so far.  Did you do better than you thought?  Do you need to take another look at one or more goals and decide how to progress through the next six months?  Go ahead and share in the comments.  We’re all in this together.