I’ve probably mentioned that I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. It’s pointless. Most resolutions go by the wayside before the first month is out. I used to vow to eat better, to exercise more, be kinder – all the standard things that were forgotten in weeks.

Now I make goals for myself for the year. Goals help motivate me, and I post them in various places to try to hold myself accountable for meeting them.

So, before I post this year’s goals, I need to look back at what I said I wanted to accomplish last year and how I did on those.

The first goal was to finish two novels in progress: Playing at Murder and No Time for Mistakes. The second of the two, No Time for Mistakes was finished and was published in October by Sweet Promise Press. Playing at Murder did not get finished, though I made a lot of progress on it, taking it from 25,000 words to 55,000.  I need about 15,000 more words to complete it.

My other writing goal was to finish five short stories and submit each. The good news is that I actually exceeded that goal, writing six new short stories for the year. I submitted all six and five of them have been accepted by various anthologies. Four are already published; one will be come out sometime in 2022. You can see where most of them are on my Stories Page. One of them is still out on submission.

The personal goals were somewhat mixed, too.  The project of scanning photos from albums made a tremendous amount of progress but didn’t get finished. Still, I don’t have too much left.

That’s part of the ongoing effort to clear out much of the ‘stuff’ I’ve accumulated over the years, and on that front I did make considerable progress.

I didn’t make it a goal, but I did say I wanted to find something I could do to give back to the community and help those less fortunate than myself. Unfortunately, the ongoing pandemic sank most of my efforts in that direction other than providing some financial support. I’m not giving up on it yet.

So, that’s it. Some goals completed, some not. But I made progress on all of them, in most cases, considerable progress.

My next post will be the goals for 2022!