Bring it ON! My goals for the next 10 years.

It may seem a little far off, but decades around me just seem to pass by and crumble far too quickly. The '90s saw me finishing my education. The turning of this past decade saw me fall in love, get married, and have a small, yet somehow barely manageable, passel of kids. So, what's next? My career of course. My muse has been waiting impatiently for me to get the minutiae done so that he can take over, and I am giving him the next 10 years to get his groove on.

It is an amazing feeling to wake up on the first morning of not only a new year, but a new decade. Goals on a day like this have to be big.

Unfortunately, as my husband pointed out, my flighty ways don't play well with long-term planning. Never fear, I have an arsenal!

FOCUS BOARD--I make one of these every year, and every year, at least half the goals are accomplished. I don't do resolutions. My life changes far too much for me to set myself on something so feeble as a resolution. I need flexibility combined with the seriousness of a dominatrix with a whip. Fun, yet painful, a focus board is a collage imbued with your intent for the next year. You cut up magazines, letters, articles, pictures, what-have-you, and paste them onto a piece of poster board. As you paste, you focus your intentions, your will, into the focus board. "I am going to get an agent. I am finishing 3 novels this year. I am going to go to RWA. I am going to make time for writing first." Everything worded in a positive, and if possible, in present tense.

"All of my blogs are on time this year."

That's a starter. Except that I am already a day late.

That brings me to part TWO-DO NOT LET THE LITTLE THINGS SWAY YOU OFF COURSE. Success takes time. A rejection? Brush it off. See what you can change to make it better. Rejections aren't personal (unless you have made an ass of yourself on facebook and/or twitter. Be careful what you say on those traps of embarrassment). Use them as the tools they are. I am going to enter the RITA contest. The deadline for this round ends in 3 days, so I am out for that, but that gives me this whole year to get it done! Actually, that gives me 3 months to get it done, 2 more months to put it away and work on something else, 1 month to pull it out, reread, and polish, 2 more months to send it out to beta readers for some input, then another month to reedit, then another month to put it away while I work on other writings, then I am into November and December which are crazy holiday months, and I will have to compete for writing time with family obligations, so there are a few weeks shot, but with some more beta reading and polishing, I can send it out to the RITA judges and keep my fingers crossed.

Yeah, a year goes by quick.

That's why I'm giving myself 10 of them. By 2020, I will be a best-selling author of at least 10 books, more likely more since my goal is to create 2 (I will be going for 3!) books a year. I can do it. And if I, scatterbrained, always thinking of plots and characters and what-ifs, can do it, so can you.

I'd like to send out a special thank you to Ann Aguirre, author extraordinaire, for her timely article, These Laurels Are Not For Resting: Staying Productive and Meeting Deadlines, in the RWA Romance Writer's Report. Not only did she quote our very own Textnovel Diva, Shannon, but she got the creative juices flowing for this year. I will have Write Or Die on all of my home computers. I will write at least 2000 words a day.

Okay, decade, let's do this thing!