Writing Resolutions for 2020

I know, I know, I'm late to the trend, January is already over, but I have a good reason for only publishing this post now. 

Every year when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, we make those insane resolutions and once the alcohol has worn off and we survived the hangover on January 2nd, we start slacking off and struggle to remember what we even wanted to change. I'm not innocent when it comes to bailing on my resolutions, but for 2020 I decided to try something new. I tried a so called trial month. I took January to see, which resolutions I actually want to and am able to hold on to through the entire year and by February 1st I will have those resolutions laid out, ready to be turned into routines and reality. 

Same goes for my writing goals. Last year I wanted to write every day, to finish editing at least three novels (that were still in the first draft stage), write two more and get one entirely ready for publishing. Guess what I actually got done by December 31st. Yes, I finished writing one novel. Writing every day is not something I do either, but instead of feeling guilty about that I want to acknowledge that when I do have a writing session once or twice a week, I get at least 3 or 4 thousand words down on paper. And that is also worth a lot. So after this long and maybe unnecessary intro, here my writing goals for 2020: 

1. Make a routine for my writing blog

I love writing on my blog, but I never seem to be able to implicate it into my every day routine, so for this year I want to make it a thing to work out how much I can write a week and how I can edit and publish things regularly. I know I keep promising that this time is the time I will have it figured out, but this time I will only promise you that I will work on a plan and a schedule for myself. 

2. Edit Night Changes Everything

If you are familiar with my work on Wattpad then you might know that I have two novels published in German that actually didn't do too badly (for me that means more than 1k reads) and I want to take 2020 as the year in which I finally translate Night Changes Everything into English and edit it from beginning to end. Maybe that will mean a rewrite (it will most definitely mean that) and it will take a lot of work and dedication, but I hope that if I only plan on editing one novel this year that it will seem like an achievable goal. 

3. Write The Interview 2 and 3

If you are familiar with my novel The Interview on Wattpad (I highly doubt it, it doesn't have a lot of reads) then you might know that there are still 2 parts missing in that trilogy. I'm nearly done writing The Interview 2, so that will hopefully go up on Wattpad  in the first half of 2020 and then I want to write The Interview 3 for the majority of this year.
Speaking of Wattpad. One of these days I will have to completely redo my wattpad page. My novels on there have been edited several times and there are still a lot of issues with the formating as well as some of the comments that don't work with my edited chapters anymore. I don't want to delete the novels enitrely, since that would mean losing all the reads (and let's be honest, who actually wants to do that even if they claim they don't write for the numbers).

4. Get more consistent with Twitter 

I have decided that I will probably no longer have my Instagram active, as it is nothing that I actually enjoy doing, but I want to dedicate more time to Twitter. During Nanowrimo and other challenges I really love the sense of community and the motivation that I get from interacting with so many other writers or those who are passionate about books as well and I want to keep that up for the entire year. It is difficult to manage social media with university and work and especially because I sometimes don't feel like I'm creative enough to tweet every day, but I want to try.

5. Finally figure out what to do with my novels
I know that this is a more meta resolution in comparison to the others, but there is a reason that this is still a writing goal. To this point I have 4 first draft novels on my computer and at least 6 planned to be written at some point. I'm no longer really happy with Wattpad, but at the same time I love having a platform where I'm able to publish and share my novels in their first stages and get at least some sort of feedback. Still, I don't think my future is on Wattpad, so I want to take some time this year and really think about the future for my novels. Do I want to publish them someday as actual books? Do I want to keep writing for fun and nonexistent Wattpad comments? Do I want to edit my novels to the point where I could send them out to publishers or do I want to keep writing first drafts to get all these ideas out of my head and onto paper?

So that was all I had to say for now. I know that I have not been good with my blog and social media lately and these last two posts were only chatty ones, but I am working on a couple of posts that I hope you guys will like.
What are your resolutions? Do you have any?

As always,

Take care and write on,

Lena

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