Taking Stock

The end of the year is upon us. Where did our time go? What happened to our goals? Our dreams?

All too often our ability to procrastinate has a way of getting us off track. All too soon the new year will be here, so now is a great time to review 2015 - and prepare for 2016.

If you had established goals last January, dig them out. If your goals were specific, you should have no difficulty determining how well you did. If they are more general, the answer may be more unclear, but it will provide guidance for next year's goal setting.

Review each goal and give your self a grade, then grade your work overall.

If you did not set goals last year, you can still review 2015. How did you do specifically in the following categories:

1. Writing:
     a. New work: Did you start at least one new long project? Many short projects each month?
     b. Editing: Did you work on editing your latest novel? Did you spend significant time editing your short pieces?
     c. Submitting/Publishing: Did you submit to magazines, agents, publishers your finished work(s)?

2. Marketing:
     a. Social Media: Did you work to keep your fans updated on your work on a regular basis? Posting to a variety of social media sites?
     b. Did you explore and develop places to share your writing in person? Local bookstores, libraries, or coffee shops?
     c. Did you keep your author's portfolio updated?

December is a great time to complete some of your unfinished projects and clear away the old to get ready for January and the new. Happy Holidays to all of you,

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D. Jean Quarles is a writer of Women's Fiction and a co-author of a Young Adult Science Fiction Series. Her latest book, House of Glass, Book 2 of The Exodus Serieswas written with coauthor, Austine Etcheverry.

D. Jean loves to tell stories of personal growth – where success has nothing to do with money or fame, but of living life to the fullest. She is also the author of the novels: Rocky's Mountains, Fire in the Hole, and Perception.The Mermaid, an award winning short story was published in the anthology, Tales from a Sweltering City.

She is a wife, mother, grandmother and business coach. In her free time . . . ha! ha! ha! Anyway, you can find more about D. Jean Quarles, her writing and her books at her website at www.djeanquarles.com

You can also follower her at www.djeanquarles.blogspot.com or on Facebook.

Evaluate Where You Are with Zig Ziglar

If you don't know where you are, you'll have a hard time finding directions to get you where you want to go. . . to where you should be . . .  to where you need to be.

This five minute video gives an interesting look at evaluating where you are. And, heading toward the end of the year, it seems like a good time to take a step back and take a look.

A great marketer, Zig Ziglar, had lots and lots of business and life wisdom that I'll hopefully occasionally share with you via YouTube videos. This one is Evaluate Where You Are:






MORE ON WRITING AND MARKETING

Blogging and Google Rankings – Do You Really Want to Use That Content?
Author-Reader Engagement: How to Serve Your Audience
A Book Title That Sells

Talking about evaluating where you are, how's your blogging going? Are you getting visitors to your site? How about building your authority? What about sales?

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This interactive e-class through WOW! Women on Writing will teach you to write super-charged (optimized) blog posts / articles and content that will be reader and SEO friendly, shareable, engaging, and will increase conversion. It’s a must for authors, writers, and home businesses.

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Matching Actions with Goals

We are well into the second month of 2013 and it is time to get very serious as well as professional about writing goals and the actions that make them happen before too much time elapses in 2013.

We all know that it is most productive to shave down our writing goals to the top three, maybe four for the first half of the year. We understand that too many goals will lead to frustration because it will interfere with our productivity and set us up for failure.

 We are all professionals and we also know that it takes action to make our goals come true but often our actions may not line up with our goals. How this happens is simple, life gets in the way.

So my advice to you and mainly to myself is to re-evaluate goals vs. action steps. When we do this we can change our productivity and ultimately the results of all our writing efforts.

This is what to look for when analyzing goals and actions. Ask yourself :

• Are your writing goals specific, measurable, and attainable?
• Do your action steps move you towards your goal?
• What actions can you delegate or even delete?
• How much of what you do is busy work that may actually be disguised as procrastination? ( Bingo.... A light bulb just went on in my office space)

If you can answer these questions with honesty and make the necessary changes to your writing habits you may well be on the way to publishing another great work.

Honestly we only have so many hours in any given day. Being flexible enough to allow life to happen but controlling how we spend much of our time will make our actions align with our goals in a more productive way.

Blogging for instance may not be the best use of time if you have nothing ready for submission. Revising the first paragraphs of a beginning story trying for perfection when you don't have a well rounded character, a conflict important to the reader, or any idea where the story might fit in the market place may make having the perfect beginning paragraph worthless to your goal.

My goal is to be a published children's writer. But I also want to publish magazine articles. My third goal is to make money with my writing. Blogging for pay is an action step that lines up with goal number three. Researching and writing on my children's book is an action step for goal number one. Researching for articles in the quilting arena fits my second goal.  Creating new blogs that don't directly relate to the three goals would be non-productive at this stage and clearly for me allows me to procrastinate so I am deleting those for the time being.

This is how I see myself in the middle of month two of 2013. I need to realign my actions with my goals. How are you feeling about your actions and your goals? Whether you are an expert author or just beginning your writing career,  it is never a waste of time to re-evaluate where you are going and how you are going to get there. And whatever you do, keep writing.

Terri Forehand writes stories for children, health related articles for a variety of blogs, and is the author of The Cancer Prayer Book and The ABC's of Cancer According to Lilly Isabella Lane. Living in Nashville Indiana with her husband she finds the beauty of nature there gives way to procrastination. Visit her blog at www.terri-forehand.blogspot.com or her website at www.terriforehand.webnode.com