My 5 Writing Goals for 2021 - How Did I Get On?

At the beginning of 2021, I set myself a few writing goals for the year.

We're now approaching the end of 2021, so how did I get on?

1. Draft Two of Book 13

I wrote the first draft of Book 13 during Nanowrimo 2020 and I absolutely loved working on it again at the beginning of the year. It's a festive story and I'm hoping to share it by Christmas 2022.

2. Draft two of Book 12

The first draft of Cleo's story was written during Lockdown 1 and I worked on it again during early 2021. It was such a fun book to write and I loved returning to Clifton-on-Sea and getting to know Cleo.

3. Publish A Beginner's Guide To Salad paperback

A Beginner's Guide To Salad was my first full-length novel, which I self-published back in 2014 in ebook only. So after figuring out how to create paperbacks for Everything Changes But You and The 12 Christmases of You & Me, I really wanted to do the same for Ruth and her friends.

And since I was publishing the paperback for A Beginner's Guide To Salad, I figured I may as well do the same for Book 2 in the series. So I gave myself a bonus goal of publishing the paperback for A Beginner's Guide To Saying I Do.

I'd always planned to write a third book in the Beginner's Guide series but I'd never got it quite right and kept putting it aside. But working on the paperbacks of the first two books relit the Ruth-shaped fire and I started mulling over what was wrong with all those drafts and how I could tell the story in the right way. I was in between projects by this point as it was still early on in the summer and I wasn't due to start my next book until Nano... so I wrote a whole new draft, which finally became the third book in the series, A Beginner's Guide To Family Life (which I published as both an ebook and paperback).

4. Plan Book 14

Book 14 was supposed to written as part of Nanowrimo 2021. But A Beginner's Guide To Family Life became Book 14. And then I accidentally wrote a whole new book over the summer, which is Book 15. So the Book 14 I had in mind while compiling my goals is actually Book 16, which I plotted out prior to Nano.

5. Take part in NanoWriMo 2021

I didn't know whether my local Nano group would be able to meet up in person this year, but I was looking forward to taking part whether it was in-person or online (it turned out to be online again this year). I love the community spirit of Nano and it was the Zoom meetings I was looking forward to more than anything, so I wasn't disappointed when I didn't reach the 50k goal this time.

2021 has been a bit of a weird year for me personally with some big changes (and that's without even thinking about the impact of covid) so I'm majorly impressed with everything I've achieved this year: I finished two books, wrote two more, and compiled a short story collection (The Perfect Winter Weekend). I'm not sure I'll get quite as much done in 2022 and my goals will reflect this, but I am looking forward to returning to the accidental novel I wrote during the summer to work on the next draft.