New Year Resolutions

I believe in New Year's Resolutions. Not in the sense that I am going to lose weight, or be nicer to people, or anything like that. I just believe that one should take stock periodically and determine if they are going in the direction that they want to be headed.

And the New Year is as good as time as any other to do this. In fact, if some of your resolutions like mine involve your business, then it is the perfect time of year (unless you use a different accounting period) because we are thinking about our taxes and year end bottom line.

Mine was not as large as I would have liked it to be. And it was nowhere near where my wife would have wanted it to be. But I did make progress from the year before. Plus I am expected to match it this year based on having a certain amount of material on revenue sharing sites.

So I decided that my sole New Year's Resolution, outside of maybe trying to figure out how to increase the lodge's membership, is to increase the amount of money that I make as a writer. I chose a figure almost double of what I made last year. I wanted a figure that would be hard to accomplish, but still could actually happen if I treated my writing as a business. Plus, it needed to be low enourgh to allow me to maintain my college grade point average.

As writers, I figure we should all have an income goal for the year. Something to gauge our efforts by, and hopefully make us strive harder at our craft. For some people, the goal will be to finish a novel, or organize their office, or getting people (one's friends and family) to respect the fact that writing is a real career. For me, all of these tie into making more money this year as a writer than I did last year.

Our goals as writers do not have to involve money. Some of my goals as a writer definitely do not involve making a lot of money (some types of writing do not have large audiences). But I think that we need goals, and periodic reminders that we can become better writers.

Happy New Year!