I honestly can’t believe it’s time for this. How is it 2023 already?!
Last year was such a crazy year for me.
For 2022, I set goals for my financial wellbeing, health, professional life, and creative self.
Somehow, I managed to do fairly well at accomplishing those goals. I might’ve had three different jobs before I settled on my current job, averaged about 4-5 hours of sleep a night, and crammed in a lot of my goals at the end of the year, but I felt good about it. The SMART goal system worked well for me in 2022.
You can read about my 2022 goals at this link | Blog 2022 Year in Review
What exactly is a SMART goal?
If you aren’t familiar SMART stands for Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and Time-Bound. As a former educator, it’s something I used a lot in the classroom, but I‘ve found it works well in my personal life as well.
For example, I could say ”I want to read more books next year.”
The only SMART letter that really hits is “Time-Bound” defining next Year. More books than when? How many books?
A better goal would be “I want to read 3 books per month in 2023 for a total of 36 books by the end of the year. 12 books from the Friends of Fiction Book Club Challenge, 12 books recommended by friends, and 12 books from my current TBR pile.”
It’s specific because it tells me what I want to do and where the parameters are coming from. It’s measurable because I numbered the minimum books. It’s achievable because I can easily read 3 books a month. It’s relevant because I want to do it, and it’s good for me as a writer, and it’s time-bound in two ways, by month and by year.
While every goal I list below won’t be fully fleshed out as a SMART goal, I definitely recommend giving this a try If you’ve made less specific goals in the past and had a hard time focusing on them and achieving them. SMART goals give you a little more laser-focus. And they’re a lot easier to put on a planner or mark off a fancy bullet journal or fridge tracker or spreadsheet or whatever you use!
Buckle up! It’s gonna be a long one.
*drum roll please*
Personal, Writing, Financial and Professional are the four areas I’m focusing on.
Rosie Rose’s Goals for 2023
I picked two words to define my year. If I'd picked a word for 2022, it would have been SURVIVE. Last year was a wild ride.
This year, I've picked THRIVE because I feel like surviving 2022 has put me in a position to thrive this year, and I need to capitalize on that. And I also picked CHALLENGE because I do want to challenge myself this year, especially where writing is concerned.
Personal
📚Read 36 fiction books - Last year I set a modest goal to read 10 genre books. It was low because I hadn’t been reading at all, which I recognize I need to do as a writer, but I was in grad school and had to read a lot.
I managed to read six. Most of those during December. I did start American Gods but I did not have the time to read that when I started it.
I am using the aforementioned plan. Twelve books from the Friends of Fiction Book Club Challenge. Twelve books recommended by friends. Twelve books from my current TBR.
This is a minimum goal. I hope to read more.
📚Read 4 non-fiction books - A friend of mine has a list of great non-fiction books about unpacking privilege, racism, exvangelical issues, misogyny, etc. I’d like to try to read four non-fiction books this year as well.
📚 Return to Streaming on Twitch - I miss streaming on Twitch so much! I have plenty of games I picked up over the last couple of years to stream. I finally hooked up my PS5 camera. I’m ready to go! I‘d like to stream at least twice a week. We’ll see how it fits in, but video game streams won’t be the priority. It comes after writing and reading. It was nice to get a few random paychecks from Twitch in the past though.
💪 Lose 25-40lbs - I have a goal weight I want to be at, which I won’t divulge here. I lost about 50lbs in 2021. I maintained that for most of 2022 until the last quarter. I’ve gained 10-15lbs back. So I’m tacking that onto the 25lbs I wanted to lose last year, but didn’t. This will mostly be accomplished via revamping my eating habits. I’ll probably go back to tracking my food intake for a while.
🧘♀️ 190 Days of Yoga - I hit 128 days of Yoga in 2022. 190 days will be slightly over one half of the year. That’s what I’m going for! Can’t wait to start Yoga with Adriene’s new 30 Day Yoga Series called CENTER this month. Feel free to join me!
🏃♀️ 3-5 days of cardio a week - We bought a treadmill for a Christmas present to ourselves. I’m shooting for 2 miles, 3-5 days a week, to start with. I need to get my average steps per day back up to at least 7000. Depending on how cardio heavy the yoga I do that day is, I may do less walking. I need more cardio.
Writing
My writing goals are going to be a lot more specific for 2023, last year it was “Write 5,000 words a month” which I did not achieve, except in November and December.
✍️ Holiday Romance WIP- Complete writing Holiday Romance WiP by January 15th. Let it rest for a month and potentially have a couple Pre-Alpha readers for general plot/character impressions. Re-read, edit in late-February, early March. Query to presses accepting un-agented holiday romance submissions. If not accepted by August, prepare to self-pub and set pre-order date for Holiday season 2023.
✍️ Kindle Vella serials - Start 2-4 serials on Kindle Vella. I do have a loose plan for this, but I’m not going into detail here. These will likely be contemporary romance or erotic romance. I have a couple started, that I can pick up on. I plan to use January to do some light plotting for these and start writing and hopefully start publishing in February! Maybe I’ll write a Valentine’s one, as a debut.
✍️ Phoenix Rising (urban fantasy) Rewrite - Re-read and re-draft my urban fantasy Phoenix Rising my 2014/2015 NaNoWriMo project. This needs some world building help, but it won’t be an extensive rewrite the way the next ones will be. I’m generally fairly happy with it. I would consider self-publishing this or putting it on Vella or something similar.
✍️ Re-read, world build Love in the Time of Paleblood (High Fantasy) - My loosely inspired by Bloodborne high fantasy WiP didn’t get any love this year. It’s sitting around 70k. It will likely be a trilogy. It needs a massive amount of world building before I can move forward. I don’t want to keep going until I iron some things out, which is saying something for me. Ideally, I will get the plot and world building sorted out enough to use it for my NaNoWriMo project again in November for some good drafting.
✍️ Re-plot Alias (thriller) - I have this thriller I wrote in the NaNo seasons of 2011 and 2012. It’s about 90k words. I’ve had a (maybe) brilliant idea to re-write it as a thriller IN SPACE (soft sci-fi for sure). It will solve some of my plot holes, and give me more room to play with the conspiracies, etc., without grounding it too much in the reality of the CIA/government. It also gives me more room to play with the technology, which I was already pushing the boundaries with in a believable setting. I would like to iron out this plot and have it ready to re-draft in 2024. I’ve been sitting on it for too long.
✍️ Weekly Twitch Writing Stream - I want to do at least one writing sprints stream on Twitch a week. I seem to be most productive when I stream writing sprints. In two hours, I can hit nearly 5k words! At least during NaNoWriMo months. I can imagine I can have some good word counts from weekly Twitch writing streams.
✍️ Attend 3 Cons - I’ll be going to the SAGA Genre Writer’s Conference in March. Hope to attend Con Carolinas in June. Not sure what the third one will be, but hoping to attend at least three because I didn’t go to any last year.
✍️ Blog 2-4 times a month - I want to keep blogging about writing, life, etc. Here and on LinkedIn/professional portfolio website.
✍️ Complete building Rosie’s Reverie website - I need to get the Projects page finished and live! That’s my main focus right now with the website.
✍️ Join TikTok for Book promo - I’ve been a TikTok holdout, but I’ve heard it can do wonders for writers, so I’m going to take the bait and join up and see what I can learn about promoting my writing on BookTok.
I don’t need to make any more writing-related goals, because I’m probably skirting the edge of what’s Achievable in a year. I am planning on treating writing like a second, part-time job, however. The time I used for my grad classes last year is going to be used for writing this year.
Financial
💰Pay off two to three debts - With my new job, this is hopefully more attainable. I did manage to pay off one debt in 2022, but I accrued others. So there’s that. Working hard on this one the first 6 months of 2023.
💸Put $5000 in savings - Again, my new job should make this more attainable, but you never know because life is expensive and often sucks.
THE PREVIOUS TWO GOALS ARE SUPER IMPORTANT BECAUSE
💸 Buy a house - We’re hoping to move to the Lexington, KY, area before the end of October 2023. I work remotely for the University of Kentucky right now, and we want to move to the area. It puts us about halfway between where I live now near my family and where my partner’s family lives, too. I’m most apprehensive about this goal because of the housing market and our current debt level (especially my student loans). I have a couple realtor suggestions. I’ve been keeping an eye on a few geographic areas on Zillow. I’d like to get the ball rolling in February or March.
Professional
👩💼Keep my new job all year - It may seem silly to say something like ”keep a job all year”, but honestly, my resume has been whack since I stopped teaching full time in 2019 and then Covid happened. I’ve bounced between substitute jobs, interim jobs, AmeriCorps, other classroom jobs, waiting tables…it’s been a mess. I’m ready for some stability in my professional life.
I want to start contributing more in my job as well, now that I’m a full member of the team. I’d like to produce another 2-3 full development modules this year and bring more ideas to the table.
I would like to put in AT A MINIMUM three years at UKY. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the position I’m in now, but somewhere at UKY. The amazing 401k benefits they have will be vested in 3 years, and I have zero saved for retirement, so it seems like a good plan. Especially since we’re looking to move to the area, too.
👩💼Professional development - I mentioned in the writing goals that I wanted to go to 3 cons this year. One of those Cons, could be a Learning & Development conference. They don’t necessarily all three have to be writing cons. As an Instructional Designer, it’s important to stay on top of the latest developments in the field! If I can’t go to an L&D Con, then I will at least attend online webinars and other professional development opportunities.
📚Read 4 L&D books - I have a really long list of books on L&D, and I’d like to read four this year. One per quarter seems doable, along with the 36 genre books.
So 44 books total with the 36 fiction and 4 non-fiction and 4 professional development books!
*****
Alright, well, I think that’s it! I might be a little tired just thinking about these goals, but as long as I stay focused they should all be achievable. I was able to achieve a pretty significant list in 2022 and that was with my grad classes. I have a lot of things to catch up on now that I don’t have homework.
Let me know in the comments what some of your goals are for the year! Or if you were able to take the insight on SMART goals and amp your resolutions/goals up a little bit.
For now,
Rosie J.
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