Once again, I set certain writing goals for myself at the start of the year.

Now that 2019 is almost over, it’s time to take a look back at those goals and see how I did.

While I never set specific goals related to publication, since that’s something I don’t have control over outside of self-published stories, 2019 saw the publication of my first pulp fiction story, “The Domino Lady Takes the Case,” as part of Airship 27’s Domino Lady Volume 3 collection.

It was also a notable year for me as a game writer, with the release of Parachronism: Order of Chaos (the first game I was ever hired to work on), Two Till Midnight (a horror game I wrote lore and backstory notes for), and Not It (the result of an exciting Halloween visual novel jam).

Those were some good achievements, but what about my writing goals? Let’s take a look at that list from the start of the year…

• Complete my final edits of A Prince’s Price and send it to a beta reader.
• Edit The Nightbringer based on feedback I recently received.
• Edit A Prince’s Price based on the feedback I receive.
• Once they are completely edited, search for an agent for The Nightbringer and A Prince’s Price.

I met these four goals. Both A Prince’s Price and The Nightbringer have been read and revised, and they’re now in the list of manuscripts I’ve been sending out query letters for. No luck yet, but here’s hoping.

• Edit The Sunken Sapphire.

This is the first goal I missed. I haven’t touched The Sunken Sapphire since I finished the rough draft last year. I more or less switched it out for a different goal, which we’ll get to next.

• Create an outline for the revisions of either The Threshing Night or Mage’s Test.

Not only did I create an outline of revisions for one of these novels, I did it for both of them. Then I revised The Threshing Night according to my new outline of revisions (they’re both disasters, but I decided it was the less disastrous of the two). It still needs work, but it’s in a lot better condition than when I started.

So effectively, revising The Threshing Night replaced revising The Sunken Sapphire. I hadn’t intended to go beyond the outline of revisions, but once I started thinking about how to fix it, I wanted to give it a try instead of setting it aside again.

• Write at least 3 more short stories.

I met and exceeded this goal! I wrote two more pulp fiction stories, to follow this year’s publication of “The Domino Lady Takes the Case,” and two new horror stories. I also pulled out an old rough draft of a science fiction story, revised it, and submitted it to an anthology.

Here’s hoping for good news in regards to all of these stories in 2020!

• Continue to manage my two side websites and get them to a level where they do bring in income.

My side websites did bring in a fraction of what could be considered “income,” but I would consider this goal to be a failure – not just because of the tiny amount of income, but because I stopped consistently managing them. This is something I definitely want to work on next year.

• Add an additional “event” of some sort to the three book signings I currently participate in.

While I didn’t attend an additional book signing event this year, I did find two more that I could possibly add to my list. I’ll consider this goal partly-completed.

All in all, it was a pretty good year. I didn’t meet every goal, but I did accomplish the major ones. What about you? If you set goals for yourself at the start of the year, how did you do?