Goals: looking back and pushing forward

I recent­ly wrapped up what I think will be my last in-per­son school vis­its of the 2015–2016 school year, and pro­mo­tion activ­i­ties for the three books that are out is start­ing to die down. This seems like a good time to pause and reflect on my goals and progress, espe­cial­ly since I was too busy at the begin­ning of the year to do my usu­al review and plan­ning exercises.
Since this time last year, I’ve done:

• 1 high school presentation,
• 13 mid­dle school presentations,
• 4 ele­men­tary school presentations,
• 6 Skype vis­its (includ­ing one to Hawaii, one to Brazil, and one more to go!),
• 3 radio interviews,
• 2 preschool storytimes,
• 2 teen library events,
• 1 adult library event,
• 2 Girl Scout workshops,
• 3 book­store sign­ing events,
• 1 book launch party,
• 1 blog tour,
• 1 book trailer,
• 1 sto­ry­time activ­i­ty kit,
• the Texas Book Fes­ti­val in Austin,
• the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of School Librar­i­ans (AASL) con­fer­ence in Columbus,
• the Pacif­ic North­west Library Asso­ci­a­tion con­fer­ence (PNLA) in Portland,
• the Inter­na­tion­al Lit­er­a­cy Asso­ci­a­tion’s (ILA) con­fer­ence in St. Louis,
• one research trip to St. Louis,
• Indies First! on Small Busi­ness Sat­ur­day at Secret Gar­den Books,
• 1 guest lec­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Washington,
• 2 appear­ances at a chil­dren’s museum,
• 2 sum­mer camp visits,
• 2 Twit­ter chats (includ­ing one for WWE moms!),
• 2 record­ings for TeachingBooks.net,
• 1 SCBWI Crys­tal Kite Award pre­sen­ta­tion at SCBWI-WWA’s Inside Sto­ry event,
• 1 mid­dle-grade book writ­ten and submitted,
• 3 pic­ture books revised (but not yet finished),
• 1 YA project edit­ed and revised (still in progress),
• pre­lim­i­nary research for 2 new book projects,
• at least 2 major web­site over­hauls (one here and one for Online Author Vis­its),
• vol­un­teer­ing for We Need Diverse Books,
• vol­un­teer­ing for SCBWI West­ern Wash­ing­ton, and
• 19 blog posts.

Not too shab­by! It’s so easy in this busi­ness to feel like I nev­er get any­thing done. I have a stack of in-progress man­u­scripts that I des­per­ate­ly want to per­fect so they can go out and try to find their pub­lish­ing homes, and every day that they don’t quite get there (or worse, don’t make any progress at all!) feels like a big fat fail­ure. List­ing out all of the things that I have done makes me feel a lit­tle bit bet­ter. I haven’t just been spin­ning my wheels, after all! I did­n’t get to fin­ish every­thing I had hoped to by now, but I did check off some big goals and also did a bunch of things I had­n’t expect­ed or planned on. And, many of the things list­ed were firsts for me and/or major high­lights, so there’s a lot of per­son­al growth hid­den in that list as well as some major accom­plish­ments to be proud of. So, all in all, not bad!
Still, there’s so much more I want to do! My goals for the rest of the year include:

• fin­ish­ing up revi­sions for the first book in the Two Truths and a Lie series: It’s Alive!,
• com­plet­ing the pho­to research for It’s Alive!,
• attend­ing the ALA Annu­al Con­fer­ence in Orlan­do to accept the Schnei­der Fam­i­ly Award,
• revis­ing my non­fic­tion pic­ture book until it’s ready for submission,
• revis­ing one of my fic­tion pic­ture books until it’s ready for submission,
• revis­ing the mid­dle-grade non­fic­tion pro­pos­al until it’s ready for submission,
• revis­ing the YA project until it’s ready for submission,
• final­iz­ing the out­line for Two Truths and a Lie, Book #2, and begin­ning the writing,
• and writ­ing more blog posts.

There are sev­er­al oth­er man­u­scripts I hope to fin­ish revis­ing, as well as a hand­ful of new ideas I’m real­ly excit­ed about research­ing fur­ther and begin­ning to write, but those will all just have to wait until I com­plete the above. Revi­sion is one of those things that’s dif­fi­cult to pre­dict how long it will take, so I’m not sure if this list is even any­where close to doable. I’ll check back in Jan­u­ary to let you know how I’ve done! 🙂