To continue with the theme of scatter-brained posts, I had goals for 2016 to wrap up, but I don’t have them anymore. They were on my MacBook which had to be wiped because of a malware invasion, and apparently the file wasn’t in Dropbox… The fact that I don’t remember most of them is probably a good indication that I failed at most of them, but here’s what I do remember!

1. I did NOT win my Goodreads challenge, and Goodreads feels the need to remind me of that fact every time I open the app…
2. I won NaNoWriMo for the second year running!
3. I finished the first draft of my first novel! insert terrified emoji here It’s a total complete mess, but I finished the thing!
4. I learned lots of programming stuff that I am not going to get into here because you most likely don’t care, and I don’t wanna explain it… Ok so really that wasn’t an official goal for 2016 until two weeks ago, but I made it my goal over Christmas break, and I accomplished it, so I’m counting it!
5. Added together, all the writing projects I’ve completed in 2016 total up to 111911 words! I’m pretty sure my goal was 100000, so I’m proud of that!

Goals for 2017:

1. By June 1st, I hope to have my novel ready for beta readers. If it could be by March 1st, that would be fantastic, but school is probably going to crush that dream.
2. I’m setting my Goodreads challenge for 30 books because I’m 90% sure I can meet that!
3. I am going to attempt the A to Z reading challenge, which means I have to read a book starting with each letter of the alphabet. If you know of books starting with R, Q, X, Y, or Z, please leave them in the comments! Those are the only ones I haven’t found yet…
4. For NaNoWriMo this year, I’m planning to write the second book in this series I have started. We’ll see if that actually happens because I may still be trying to sort out this mess of a thing I’m calling a novel if the unthinkable happens and I epically fail at my first goal.
5. This is the thing that I really need to do, but don’t wanna do. I’m in the middle of learning Swift and Python, (which are both programming languages), and I have a ton of notes for both all over my phone, iPad, laptop, and two notebooks, and they’re gonna have to be combined and organized before I get much further into this. I was planning to do this over Christmas break, but I just added to the mess instead because I’m a nerd like that!

I feel like I should list my upcoming posts here, but I still have all those that got caught in drafts, and honestly the next couple posts are gonna be embarrassingly late stories for Short Story Society. How did you do on your 2016 goals, (writing or otherwise?) Got anything cool planned for this year? Are you planning to join The HP Writing Cup? Let’s chat in comments!