Around this time of year it’s traditional to reflect on the year that’s been and set some goals for the year to come. I tend not to write down the latter, because there’s a massive element of hubris involved in doing so. I did in fact post a list of targets here at the start of 2009 and then took the list down straight away and moved it to the private forum of my writers’ circle because it looked a bit silly (although I did in fact hit five out of the nine specified goals). This year they went straight to the private forum.
Anyway, let’s see what happened with some of those ten goals for 2010, shall we?
1) Finish Mrs Darcy versus The Aliens – well, can’t argue with that.
2) Either get it published properly or get a sufficient following on the serialisation to make merchandising a possibility – well, the least said about merchandising the better, but I did get a publisher.
3) Get on the shortlist for either Fish or Bridport (left over from 2009) – somewhat unexpectedly, I got on both shortlists this year, although the fact that the Bridport one was for poetry was a bit of a curveball. For some reason, I didn’t mention either the Bristol or Sean Ó Faoláin in my list, because that would have looked a bit greedy. Oh well.
4) Win a poetry prize – thank you, JBWB, for that one.
7) Do more live readings, including poetry – well, I did do some more live readings (principally at Sparks), and I did read some poetry at one open mic evening. But I still need to work on that in 2011, I think. This will include developing some voices for reading extracts from Mrs Darcy. Ahem.
So that’s five out of ten goals achieved, which I suppose isn’t too bad. Oddly, the one goal that I failed to mention in my list at all was “Get something broadcast on the BBC.” Must have thought that one was completely out of the question …
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