As you know, I keep a writer’s bullet journal to keep track of my projects and my goals. This year, I’m focusing more on months than on years. Smaller goals, and more fresh starts. There’s something incredibly productive about self-forgiveness.

Last year’s writers’ bullet journal focused a lot on the year. In fact, if you look at my word count spreads, there’s no break between months. Now, self-forgiveness aside, that makes it a little difficult to switch from one project to the next, when you’ve finished something. It also makes it tough to look back, and see whether you were working on that thing with the Vikings or the thing with the empaths.

And so, I have moved my ongoing projects to the first columns on the page. #1? Short stories. I am curious how many words I put into shorts, but I have no intention of changing a column every time I finish a short story. Column #2 is blogging, which is a new column for this year. (I wrote words, and damn it, I deserve credit.)

That leaves four columns for long-format fiction. Right now, I’m just using one, because there’s only one thing I’m actively working on. I might shift some of my back-burner projects into the empty columns, at some point.

Eventually, there will also be a column for totals (on days where I work on more than one project) and a column to count the number of days in a row that I’ve written.

I’m doing everything by the month in my writer’s bullet journal. Word count. Books read. Blog posts. Even the habits I’m working on forming. I’m hoping to catch the momentum of New Year’s twelve times a year.

I worked on a lot of projects last year. Most of them were drafting and new words, so that means I have a lot of revision to do this year. I have started in on revising one of the manuscripts, and have broken each step down into small chunks to check off on the list.

The goal of reading every novel that has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards got pushed into this year.  I get distracted by all the shiny, other books in the world. These are the ones I have left.

So, there you have it. I keep intending to add some nice pictures, or stencil in some decoration, but so far, it’s a little stark.

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