Writing Goals for 2017

Here are my writing goals for 2017:

1) Finish revisions to my short story, La Jolla Ballroom, and submit for writers' group anthology. This one is done, I did the final revisions this morning.

2) Finish current novel, The Love Machine, by June. I think I'm over halfway done at this point. I've been doing editing and revision of each chapter after reading it aloud at my writers' group, so it (hopefully) will need little revision once I get to the end. June's pretty ambitious, but I should be able to manage it.

3) In January, complete beta reads for manuscripts. I'm beta reading two novels for fellow authors in my writers' group.

4) Revise third novel (probably starting in June). Also, come up with a good title for it. My third novel, finished a couple years ago, languishes in limbo. It's done but needs a a major re-write.

5) Continue work on short stories, including Steader, and others as time permits. I have a short story I started a few months ago titled Steader that I think could be really good. Just need to finish it! Plenty of other ideas for stories floating around too, nothing too well-formed, but lots of things with potential.

5A) But only write short stories if it is something new. I feel like I've gotten in a little bit of a rut with my short stories--some of my recent ones have seemed too similar in tone, and too easy for me to write. So I've determined only to write short stories that will stretch my writing muscles in some way. For La Jolla Ballroom, it's using period dialect from the 1930s. For Steader, it's writing a tense thriller.