Real Words

I’ve mentioned here a few times that I’m working on establishing and accomplishing a series of new writing goals. Those included:

• Cataloguing my work
• Getting published in more print magazines
• Finishing a personal book
• Doing more collaborative projects

I’ve added a few more goals to that list:

• Submitting work to anthologies
• Setting and achieving some clear goals for my 3 personal blogs
• Creating and executing a plan for more active promotion of my Hubs

Taking a look at my list, I’ve figured out that there is one specific writing goal that needs to come before everything else: getting organized!

I tend to be basically good at getting naturally organized. My freelance finances are in order. I’ve got my client’s files in good shape. None of that is a problem. However, I need more organization as it relates to these specific goals because there are areas where I’ve let things go. So, my specific goals for getting organized include:

• Doing my planning on paper. Several of these goals require creating action plans. I like to do those in my head but I’m actually going to do them on paper.
• Collecting all of my creative writing. I have poems, stories, essays and books that are written and half-written. They are in journals, on scraps of paper, on various computer files and who knows where else. Before I can reasonably submit work to anthologies and magazines, I need to be able to see what I have. This means learning about good methods of organizing this stuff and then going through the process of organizing it. That’s the big goal as far as this goes.
• Deleting all unnecessary files. I back things up all of the time and I have multiple copies of several things that I didn’t need to save in the first place. I want to get to where I only have what I really need again.

So, I’m still working on the bigger goals but I’m focusing right now on the small organizational goals that I believe will put me in a better place for meeting the big goals in the end.