2010 Goals- What are yours?

Okay, I know I am late with this thought, 2009 is already six days behind us, but it is something I have been wanting to talk about. Seems I have been giving my "New Years Resolution" everywhere else I go, so now I need to tell you here.


I don’t do "New Year’s Resolutions". I find that when I make them, I never accomplish them, there is nothing, but myself to hold me accountable. But a goal, now that I can undertake and see to completion.


I know resolution- goal- same thing right? Actually, no. Resolution also means, fortitude, resolve, a decision to do something, without really intending to follow through (this is just a generalization not a classification :). Like the resolution, "I want to lose weight this year", that is just a promise filling empty air. But a goal, a goal pushes you forward, you see an end in sight- no matter how distant, it is still there. A goal is an ambition, an intent, a target.


I have two major goals this year that I intended at the first of this year to do come what may. I want to take my polish edits as far as possible on my first novel. Somehow to me this seems a more daunting task than my other goal. The end is more hazy, but I can still see the end, I know it’s there and I just have to keep pushing forward.


My second goal is to finish the rough draft of my second manuscript. This a pretty basic, simple demand on my life right now. I am writing 1,000 words a day and even before the end of the year gets here, I will have a full fledged novel that will just need to be edited down to as close as perfection as I can take it. But I have to be careful of this "simple goal". Something like this I could easily push to the wayside. To keep myself from throwing excuses to the wind, I sit down everyday and write. And I don’t stand up until those 1,000 words are done. You would be amazed at how fast thoughts flow your fingertips when you put yourself in such a constraint.


How about you? What goals do you have set for the new year and are they still sitting on the shelf as resolutions, gathering dust, or are they put before you as goals, ones you are striving mightily to accomplish?