I meant to do this at the beginning of July and now it's halfway through... But better late than never, right? Her's my (late) mid-year check in on how I'm tracking on my goals for 2025.
Dear Me,
I did pretty well with 2024's goals, so here's to doing as well in 2025.
Despite having got absolutely no traction so far in querying Guide Us, I will keep persevering with it. I know this is a good book and I'm really weirded out that it hasn't had any requests. The last book I queried was the same, but at least with that one, I knew there was something in it that might prove difficult for agents and/or publishers even if I didn't advertise it in the query. With Guide Us, I don't think there's anything too controversial in there... I guess religion could be controversial though. Especially questioning it.
I haven't done this. I decided I'd be better off holding onto this one in case I got an agent for the next book and they wanted to see something else. So I'm sitting on Guide Us for the moment. We'll see what happens. I probably need to publish a girl POV book next, so maybe this will be the one.
I have a book - Standing Too Close - coming out sometime later in the year; I'm still waiting for a date for that. Hopefully I'll find out soon because I'd like to be able to start things rolling as far as publicity goes as soon as possible. I'm also waiting on edits for that one and would like to get through those before I dive into revisions and editing on A Stranger to Kindness. They're both boy narrator books but the voices are very, very different.
It's coming out 8 August, so I'm deep in publicity mode now, having done edits and all that. It's available for pre-sale if you haven't already clicked to that...
And talking about A Stranger to Kindness, the plan for that is to get it revised and ready to query before the end of the year. I feel like that's going to be a tough one because I love this book so much and if it winds up getting the same response as Guide Us, it's going to be somewhat devastating. I need to mentally prepare for that.
Done this too and have the rejections to prove it. Keeping on keeping on with the querying and hoping one sticks eventually...
Luckily, by the second half of the year my work will have ramped right up so I will probably be far too busy to get too upset. Here's hoping anyway...
Nope. I'm busy and it still hurts.
And as far as non-writing goals go, I suppose they're much the same as they have been for the last few years. To keep exercising, to keep reading as much as possible and to see films at the cinema least every two weeks.
Doing this. Not hard. It's part of my routine.
The exercising should be easy enough since I'm now an instructor at the gym and I'm hoping to pick up a couple more regular classes this year. I've been teaching only 30 minute spin classes, but I'm starting to learn the hour-long ones now too, so will probably pick up some of those classes in the next little while.
So far no regular one-hour classes, but I do a bit of covering for other instructors.
I've lowered my reading target for 2025 to 110 books since I've failed to meet my goal the last two years running. I've been reading more adult books than YA recently and they tend to be both longer and more complex than my usual YA reads, so they take me longer to get through. Here's hoping the large number of books I got through during my holiday last week - the weather was not great so there was a lot of time to read - kickstarts things well.
I'm behind on my reading goal but that's primarily because I've been writing a lot this year. I didn't expect to dive right into a new novel as soon as I finished revising A Stranger to Kindness, but I did. Two new novels, in fact... Yeah, I'm insane.
There are a lot of films opening the next few weeks that I want to see, so I should be able to keep up my film-going at least in the early part of the year. Things might get a little more challenging once the Award Season movies dry up, but by then the Film Society should have started up again.
I finally managed to (sort of) break my nail biting habit in 2024, so I will endeavor to keep my nails nice in 2025 too. Preferably without having to pay for expensive manicures every few weeks. I do like having my nails done properly, but it does become expensive.
Not biting them, but still getting them done semi-regularly. They're just stronger and better that way. When I leave them natural for too long, they get ragged and then I pick and bite at them to smooth them out. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
What are your goals for the New Year?
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