This might be another one of those “I’m gonna blog everyday” type of promises that I make and never fulfill.

But you know what? Having an ambitious goal that I don’t achieve often turns out better than weaksauce goals or no goals at all. Why? Because even if I don’t achieve my lofty ambitions, I still achieve something, and something is better than nothing.

This is the “fail to success” model of thinking. I think this model is better for me than being all, “Not hitting my goals just makes me feel bad, man,” kind of attitude that I sometimes convince myself is true (for myself). (This whole thing should have a giant caveat that says I’m really working out my own methods and not prescribing anything to anyone.)

I also firmly believe in the “establish your practice” model too (again, for myself… but this one I do get a bit prescriptive about with my students). Establishing your artistic practice means developing habits (often daily, though not necessarily) that allow you to do your art, making it a regular part of your life.

I still think having an artistic practice is important. I’m building a life, and I want that life to include making my art. I want that life to include making my art everyday (if possible).

So yeah, establish a practice. Live it everyday if you can.

But I also think setting goals for myself — goals I often fail to achieve — helps a lot. I need to have lots of irons in the fire. No such thing as “writer’s block” only “project block” is an ethos I stand by. Learning this habit of mind has been CRUCIAL for my work as a writer. As soon as I realized that I could write anything I wanted when I sat down to write (and not just write the thing I was supposed to write), I was free. Free from thinking I was “stuck.” Free from thinking I wasn’t “in the mood.” If I have fingers to type or hands to write, and I have some paper nearby, I can write. No “block” at all. If I didn’t feel like writing the current “work in progress,” no prob. I could work on a blog post. Wasn’t feeling like that novel at the moment? No biggie, just work on a short story.

Having numerous goals is how I can stave off blockage. Having lots of writing projects, as Matthew Dicks mentions on his blog, is what gives me the freedom to keep writing.

I just finished Dicks’s Someday Is Today, which was fabulous, and in it, he encourages creators to have lots of goals and work on lots of projects, switching between them as necessary. This is often how I’ve worked in the past. Having side projects just makes sense for how my brain works.

But as I read Dicks’s book the other day, I was reminded not only to have more side projects, but that even if I don’t fully complete them all by my self-imposed deadlines, just by having the goals, I’ll accomplish more.

Take my embarrassingly unfulfilled “blog everyday” goals. On the one hand, I did not meet those goals, which means I’m a failure. But on the other hand, just by setting such a goal for myself, I blogged way more than I otherwise would have. The lofty goal propelled me to get my butt in the chair and write.

I wonder if I’m being too timid in my goals lately. Let’s say I set the goal to write a short story every week for a year. And let’s go on to say that I fail miserably at that goal. Let’s say I only manage to write three short stories that whole year.

Guess what?

That’s THREE more short stories than I had before. And if I hadn’t set the goal, I might have written none.

So what’s better? Setting no goal and getting little-to-nothing done, or setting a goal, failing at it, but writing more than I would have otherwise?

This is how to achieve things.

In such a spirit, here are all the lofty goals I want to achieve in my creative work this year. I am almost 100% certain I will not hit these goals. I am also almost 100% certain that by articulating them here on my blog, I will achieve more than I thought possible for the remainder of 2024.

My creative goals:

Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel)

Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series)

Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world

Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son

Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe

Publish my short story collection

Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series

Blog everyday (this one again!! LOL!)

Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks

Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends

Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic

Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month

Make other zines

Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter)

Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son)

Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines)

Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year

Can I meet all these goals? Maybe. Probably not. But having lofty goals means making more progress than having none. If one side project is good, then sixteen side projects is better.

I’ll try to take a page out of Dicks’s blog and post updates on my progress. I can almost guarantee that I will not meet some of these goals. But having these irons in the fire means there’s absolutely no excuse for “writer’s block.” There is ALWAYS a project I can switch to and work on when BIC time comes.