GOALS AND OTHER SHINY THINGS (I lie, it's all goals)

So here it is, my New Years Goals post! Slightly late, but psh, who even notices calendars? NO ONE. In bullet form, because I'm lazy efficient like that.

Life

(You know, the stuff which is supposed to comprise 50% of your day?)

• Pay Off Debt. Preferably by the end of April. Then I go into the second trimester of the year FREE of financial burdens. Other than rent and books, and food. Minor things like that.
• Keep Head Above Water With Job. This means keeping consciousness in-body while being paid for my presence. It's just polite, you know.
• Get Out Of The House. Fresh air, keeping my metabolism moving, and oh yeah, exercise. (Also time to think about things, and get my consciousness out-of-body. Always fun.)
• Waste Less Time On Computer. I could say use less time, but that would just be silly. How bout I make my time productive, mmmkay? That's better? That's do-able?
• Read My Bible. This is always one I'm bad with, but I even have a plan! And people to bug me if I don't do it! Go me! Go us! High Five!

Writing-Related

(The IMPORTANT 50% of your day! )<

(You smile because you think I'm joking. I'm not. Story is ALWAYS more important than food.)

• Finish Karma Police. This means I have to 1.) write it, and 2.) figure out what on earth I'm writing. Case in point? I have to figure out who the bad guys are, if they know they're the bad guys, and if they die at the end. That's one of, uh, at least seven major plot threads I need to figure out and nail down. I suppose I should be writing more then?
• At Least One Hard Edit On Karma Police. This means research, nailing down the voices of the characters, re-writing re-writing re-writing... I mean I'm pretty sure at least half the scenes I've written for part two are going to have to die, and I'm adding probably that many over again. A LOT of work, before it's even slightly coherent.
• Hard-Edit Merchant's Daughter Fix the plot. I'm not even looking at the line edits, just tighten up the plot- till it's visible at least. Wow, that makes me despair just thinking about it.
• And while we're on the theme of despair- Break Up And Outline Expendables.
• Refine And Build a Coherent Platform On The Internet. So far I'm all over the place. I have different names in different places, and I was trying to keep my reading/writing self seperate from my "real" self, because I was scared/ashamed of that. NO MORE. This also means I should use my real name. Ulp.
• Write Two Short Stories (Novellas?) At Least. I want to get the unicorn/greek/robot/poison/dust thing out of my head, and also the freaky untitled story with Elizabeth and Albert in it. My strange, strange, strange characters. That could be my most grown-up story yet, since they, y'know, have kids, and it could also fail entirely, it's so strange. Either way, it'll be one of those where you stop writing and feel like you've been staring at feathers for five days while living only on moldy cheese. (That's pure conjuncture on my part, of course)
• Take A Fiction Class (?) Self Explanatory? But I'm not sure if I have the money/time, so it's a maybe.
• Research Like Mad For the-novel-currently-known-as-J4. I really like this story, but it requires some explanation, especially if any of my family reads this. Some of you know that my little brother was diagnosed with cancer almost three years ago now. Over the course of that journey since then, I've witnessed a lot in some pretty exclusive circles. Due to circumstances I wasn't actually actively involved in most, but I've seen a lot. My Dad wrote music about it, but for me all the stories starting beating against each other inside my head and turning into a story. So a lot of the incidences which happen are based on things which happened in real life, they aren't intended to be a factual representation of those things which really happened, and in fact they end differently in a bunch of cases. And the characters are not supposed to be real life, any more than every angry girl I write is me, or I actually know any Ewan-type characters. Whew. But though I love this story dearly, it's set in a couple of circles which I've witnessed from the sidelines, but never actually moved in. So it'll need a lot of research on things like Child Protection Services, Cancer Treatment Regimens, and High Schools. ^_^
• And this one at my family's insistence- Get Something Published. Even if I self-publish, they say I should get it out there. EEP.

There it is then! All my goals. :D