Goal-Setting for a Brand-New Year Ahead

Planning the Word-Related Life for the Next 365 Days

Welcome to your ultimate Shelf Life. The ultimate Shelf Life of 2020. By ultimate I mean it’s the last one. It is in no other way ultimate. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to discover that the last day of 2020 falls on a Shelf Life publication date. Serendipitous.

I am anticipating a stellar 2021. I think there’s going to be a lot to celebrate, like:

1. COVID vaccine

2. I might be able to see Black Widow?

3. Trashfire year 2020 no longer actively happening

4. Milestone birthday

I’m really hoping to make it a productive year in terms of my word-related activities—the ones outside of my day job, which is also a word-related activity—and I know that in order to do that I need to be as organized as I can and I need to make myself accountable to someone and since you’re here anyway I’m just going to go ahead and be accountable to you. Today’s article, the very last article of Shelf Life’s very first year in publication, is about my word-related goals for the new year ahead and how I plan to stick with them.

Everyone knows that my main word-related hobbies are writing, reading, and journaling. While from the outside it may look like I’m doing nothing but those three things, I actually don’t do any of them nearly as much as I’d like to. 

Reading Goals

I used to be an avid reader, and I want to be again. I don’t think anybody can become and stay a great writer if they don’t read a lot. A lack of focus the past several years has really shrunk the volume of reading I do, and I’ve been pushing myself to do more. In 2020, I started two book clubs: one, which I discussed in Readers’ Advisory for Writers, is fairly organized and meets reliably, while the other is more of an ad hoc situation—I really need to text those women and get another meeting on the books, actually. 

Having those book clubs has definitely helped and next up on my reading list is The Secret Place by Tana French for a meeting in early January. I intend to read twelve books throughout 2021 with my larger book club—though I don’t yet know what they’ll be—and another twelve with my smaller book club, beginning with a reread (for me) of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone.

In addition to the 24 books that I hope to read for book clubs, which will be chosen by consensus, I wanted to add twelve more for my own personal reading. I took stock of my to-read list of 45 want-to-read titles on Goodreads, 63 unread titles on my Kindle, and more than 200 wishlisted titles spread across various bookstore apps. I reviewed each title briefly and pulled together (without counting) a list of the ones that interest me most. I came up with 25 so I had to make some choices.

To narrow it down to twelve, I applied some data analysis. I chose ten criteria that matter to me and then weighted those criteria by how much. In order of my preference, these were: 

1. My personal hype level about the author (10); for instance, I am very excited to read C.L. Polk but I don’t have a particular strong preference for any of her specific books over any other.

2. My personal hype level about the book (10); for instance, I am dying to read Gideon the Ninth but I’m not particularly interested in Tamsyn Muir overall.

3. The author is new to me, yes or no (9); they are someone I have not read before. I want to give preference to unfamiliar voices.

4. The author is Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (8); I actively want to include more diverse voices in my reading list.

5. The author is part of the Queer community (8); again, I actively want to include queer voices.

6. Page length of the book (5); I have a preference for shorter books over longer ones in hope that I can get to more books into the year.

7. Queer themes (5); I prefer to read books with queer characters and themes over books that are strictly heteronormative.

8. Woman or nonbinary main character (5); I prefer books that star women and nonbinary people over those that star men, generally.

9. Standalone (5); I would prefer to read books that are not part of a limited or ongoing series, because they are less likely to cause me to get sidetracked.

10. Debut novel (3); I would like to give a boost to early career authors versus more established authors.

You may be wondering why I did not give preference to woman or nonbinary authors; that’s because all of the authors on my list of 25 titles were women or nonbinary people (with the exception of Max Gladstone, who was part of a writing duo with a woman).

I awarded and deducted points based on those criteria through a formula that I’m sure no one has the time or interest to learn about, and then ranked the 25 titles from most points to least. For anyone who is interested, I’ll give the full list with links (not affiliate links!) at the end of this article, but here are some highlights.

With 600 points total, the clear winner was This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Four authors who I am super hyped about made it into the top twelve: C.L. Polk, Sarah Gailey, Seanan McGuire, and M.A. Carrick. M.A. Carrick is the pen name of a writing duo whose debut book, The Mask of Mirrors, launches early in 2021. One member of the duo is a personal friend, and I’ve maintained a high level of hype while they have been working on writing and publishing the novel, so I kind of already knew I’d be reading that one whether it sorted to the top or not. 

When picking out your next read, why not just read whatever you’re most excited about? From inside the publishing house you get to see how hype gets manufactured. I like to think that when I feel excitement about a book, it’s because trusted friends and critics have reviewed it, or I’ve read the author before and liked their work, or it’s won awards that I care about. But the truth is, the books that publishers feel are most likely to sell are the ones that get most of the marketing push. They’re the ones that get the most ARCs sent to reviewers and fans, they get the most prominence on Amazon, they get the most space on Goodreads. They’re more likely to be reviewed and more likely to win awards.

Hype is generated with marketing dollars that disproportionately go to White authors. It’s telling that even after factoring in my personal excitement about a title or author, leveling the playing field just a little by giving some preference to those voices less likely to receive a lavish marketing push resulted in an entirely different twelve months of reading than I may have chosen off the top of my head. 

Before I turn from the subject of the reading list, there are a few more books I want to mention: The nonfiction picks. I don’t enjoy reading nonfiction very much. There have been a few nonfiction books that I’ve liked, but there haven’t been many. I am going to try to fit a few select titles into 2021, though, for various reasons. In no particular order, those are Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari; Blindspot by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald; Grammar for a Full Life by Lawrence Weinstein; Songteller by Dolly Parton; Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee; and An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky.

Anyway, that’s 42 books for 2021. A lucky number, indeed. I’ll need to jump on that day one.

Writing Goals

You might think I am writing all the time. I feel like I’m writing all the time. To be honest, I do spend really a lot of my time writing. I work on writing Shelf Life several days a week and I spend time editing and proofreading it on all the other days. Right now, Shelf Life is my writing life. It’s working out really well. I love deadlines. The cadence of the Shelf Life publication schedule keeps me on track.

That said, I haven’t been writing much besides Shelf Life, and I want to write more. I have a finished draft of a full-length novel that needs to be revised, five short stories in various stages of revision that I’d like to be able to call complete someday, one longform nonfiction writing project underway, three more full-length novels mid-draft, and another six more in planning.

I would just love to complete something before I shed this mortal coil like a snakeskin and move on to better things. I don’t even care which thing I finish. I don’t care if it’s good. I just want something to be done.

I’ve got about eighteen hours left of 2020 and I’m going to spend some of that choosing one or two writing projects to focus on in the year to come. To help me maintain that focus, I’m splitting off all of my writing collections from my primary bullet journal that I use for . . . everything . . . and moving them to a separate journal that is only for writing- and reading-related collections, trackers, and planners. 

In the four months of this year since I started, I wrote about 80,000 words of Shelf Life. That’s a novel. Could I have done twice as much as that? Yes, probably. If this year is any indication, then I hope I’ll write around 240,000 words of Shelf Life next year. Actually, I hope I will write fewer because I’m actively trying to get the average word count down. There are 104 Shelf Life publication dates in 2021, and if I can I will try to reduce word count so we land a bit closer to 200,000. Could I reasonably—in the span of the next twelve months—write another 40% again on top of that, to just bang out a draft of anything—anything—and call it finished? 

That’s my writing goal. Get you your Shelf Life, on time every time as expected, and on top of that complete any one of my longform writing projects so I can feel, at this time next year, as though I made the most of the writing time I had in 2021.

Final Thoughts for 2020

You don’t get to read an infinite number of books in your life or write an infinite number of words. No matter how much you read or how prolifically you write, everyone is working against that final deadline. If you want to be as well-read as possible, choose what you read with discretion. Likewise, if you want to leave words behind when you go, you should start writing them right now. 

I shall close with an image that I have been wanting to share for quite awhile. I hadn’t found quite the right place to put it, but I feel like right here is it. This is a note my friend captured, exactly as written by her son James, who is clearly a born writer:

I hate writing.

Writing is the w[o]rst.

I’m not going to the zoo.

James, you hit my 2020 mood on the head when you so eloquently articulated the Shelf Life mission statement in your wide-ruled composition book. I do hate writing. Writing is the worst. And in 2020, I did not go to the zoo. I feel like James and I are living parallel lives here. Look, anyone would rather be at the zoo than be at their desk writing. But if you want to be a writer you have to write. I’m going to keep doing this for a while. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll try zookeeper next.

Thanks for listening to me scream into the void each Tuesday and Thursday morning, y’all, you’re the best. I appreciate you. See you next year.

Twenty-Twenty-One Reading List

1. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

2. Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

3. Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

4. Witchmark by C.L. Polk

5. The Deep by Rivers Solomon

6. The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis

7. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

8. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

9. The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick

10. The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

11. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

12. Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire

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