2021 Intentions

Note: I wrote this at the end of last year and completely forgot about it! So here I am, posting it now in the spirit of ‘better late than never’.

After the year that was 2020, I’m not entirely sure that setting goals or intentions is the greatest idea. However, I’m feeling cavalier and going to go ahead anyway. I don’t think any of these are huge, ‘go big or go home’ goals, but hope they’re realistic targets.

The Hollywood Project

I’d like to hit the finish line again. I’ve been aiming for 80k but as it’s an historical novel, and they tend to be generally longer, my generous, revised goal is 100k. I’m currently sitting at the 62,000 mark, I wrote approximately 30k in 2020 so I reckon it’s a reasonable goal.

The Jazz Age Mysteries

I’d like to finish plotting and, The Hollywood Project allowing, write a few chapters of the first of my Jazz Age Mysteries. I have the victims, their families (mostly, one needs to be a little less of a floating person), the killer and their motivation. So I’ve got the bones, I just need to assemble them into a skeleton and then write the flesh. Hmm, well that was a nauseating analogy.

The Online Life Of Sasha Dane

As for my “author platform”, which frankly sound pretensious as hell when I say it, but I guess that’s technically what Twitter, IG and a website amount to (gulps loudly). I have a few things I’d like to see happen in 2021, but my main goal is around consistency.

Social Media
I want to show up on Twitter and Instagram with much more regularity to be part of the fabulous communities I had a small taste of in 2020. Yes, I would love for my ‘numbers’ to grow during the year too, does anyone not want that? However, I’d prefer a smaller ‘following’ (another term that sounds ‘off’, hello narcissism) that is engaged and where I know everyone.

Sasha-Dane.com
And I want to be consistent with blogging too. I have so many ideas for this site, that I hope I can translate into posts.

Letters from the Jazz Age

I’d like to be consistent with my newsletters. The last thing I want is to send an email and for the lovely person on the receiving end to not have the foggiest idea who it’s from. I want to provide value and for subscribers to look forward to it arriving. With that in mind, I’m probably going to drop back from my initial idea of monthly emails to every other month, hopefully that will help me level up the content quality. Oh, and it would be nice to grow that list too.

Looking at these goals, neatly laid out like this, there’s a pattern. All of my goals boil down to one: I want to be consistent.

This is the hardest part for me. My days, as well as my abilities to focus, are not consistent on a day to day basis which makes showing up regularly anywhere at a specified time and place difficult to do. Curse you chronic conditions! So while I can’t guarantee I’ll be doing these things every day, I can say I will most definitely be putting in my best effort and I hope, over the course of a year, those efforts will add up.

If you’d like to receive Letters from the Jazz Age and join me on my journey I’d love to have you with me. Just put your best email in the little form that follows and I’ll see you there. [mc4wp_form id=”187″]

This time last year, when I was setting my goals for the first year of the twenties, I didn’t have this site or even any social media and I didn’t write my goals down so I have no record of what I actually intended for the year. Although given what 2020 brought with it, they probably wouldn’t have meant a lot anyway.

Bearing that in mind, here’s a little review of what I recall aiming for and how it went.

My aim was to finish my book.

It didn’t happen. I made significant progress but I didn’t get to write that all important “The End”. Although it’s not unexpected. I’d have had to write more than 50k and I’ve never written that much in a year. True, I’ve never taken writing that seriously before this year but still. That’s a lot.

One of the reasons I didn’t make more progress was I got sidetracked. By Social Media (Twitter and Instagram) and building this ‘ere site. All excellent, necessary abe enjoyable parts of being a ‘writer’ online but not at the expense of doing the actual writing.

Fully plot out the first in my murder mystery series.

As a pantser this one filled me with dread, and that may indeed have contributed to my tardiness in this area, because as you’ve probably guessed, I didn’t manage that. I made some progress in plotting this one, and I found an overall arc, or sorts, for the whole series which is unexpected and happy-making. But as of writing this post, my Deco detective is languishing in the recesses of my mind.

Fall in love again with social media.

I absolute love spending time on Twitter and Instagram. I’m there every day (give or take a few here and there). But I suck at posting. I have a gazillion ideas and as soon as I open the apps, or my notes, I can’t seem to capture any of them. Maybe it’s the idea of being ‘seen’ that’s scaring them away; maybe I’m just anti social. I don’t know, either way I’m flaky as … Nope my analogy making brain cells have taken a break … flaky as a flaky thing

Build a website.

If you’re reading this, I think you can guess how this goal worked out ?

There were probably others, but since I didn’t write them down I can’t be certain. Overall, given the extreme circumstance we’ve all been under this year, I’m pretty happy with how I did.

What I learnt from 2020…

…is that I’m not alone. As someone who has a chronic health condition my life is often, and certain,y has been for the last few years, small and limited. There are no big parties, or get togothers with friends and family. I’m home almost all of the time and rarely, if ever, venture out. It’s a personal lockdown life. And it’s fine, it happens to goodness knows how many people and there are worse, many worse, things in the world. And then the rest of the world (seemingly) went into lockdown and joined me and for the first time people understood the life I have and I realised how lonely it had been surrounded by people who didn’t. Even though the majority haven’t given a second thought to the people for whom lockdown normal. I saw how hard people found it and realised that maybe I’m stronger than I’d thought because it had never affected me as badly, maybe that’s the upside of feeling ill, you don’t feel well enough to want to be out and about.
But what surprised me most about this year was how I felt when lockdown was lifted — slightly crushed. Because it didn’t lift for me. I can’t see how it will ever lift for me. And … and I feel I should have a conclusion to draw from that, some sort of lesson or resolution to take forward with positivity but I don’t. It’s messy. It just is what it is.