Hello 2020!

Looking Back

This has been a busy year. First, one of my short stories got published in Youth Imagination Magazine! If you missed that post, please check it out here. It is about a boy with autism and a girl seeing magical creatures for the first time, who have to work together to save their neighborhood from a rampaging troll.

With Netgalley I achieved the rank of 10 Reviews this year!

I finally finished my Master of Library Science degree! Right now, I’m still teaching 6th grade English. I hope that this spring another school in my district will have a library opening that I can apply for and hopefully get. I’ve been with my district for 18 years so far and it is the district that I grew up in, so I’m kinda attached to it. But I’ll have to see what life has in store for me. I’ll go where I am led.

As a creative type person, I’m looking forward to a new set of challenges that librarianship will bring.

I’ve neglected this blog for two years while I was busy teaching full time and earning my MLS degree. I look forward to being more consistent and intentional with it now.

Looking Forward

My goals for this year are:

1. I want to publish a post every Friday. Yep. 52 posts, all related to reading and writing. One of my Christmas gifts was a book called One Hour Content Plan. Now, it certainly took longer than one hour, but it was a helpful book. I sat down and planned many of the posts for the next 3 months. So yeah!
2. I want to include more posts of what you all seem to like. Looking back at most of my recent posts I see that most of them are book reviews. I read a bunch of excellent stories last year. That is not a bad thing, but I’d like to balance the reading and writing a little bit more. Some of my most popular posts are the ones I’ve written about writing.
3. For the book review posts I do, I want to look at the books more closely for writing techniques so that both you and I can learn from the best authors.
4. For the first quarter, I will delve into writing description. This is an area in which I have quite a bit to learn, but it has been on my radar for a while. I’ve been listening and observing what others do. Mostly I see how others do it and drool with envy at how skillfully they do it, wishing desperately that I could do the same but with the wave of a magic wand instead of a lot of hard work.
5. I plan to finish writing my nonfiction book titled From Rough Draft to Published. I’ve mentioned it in passing before, but I think I’ll dedicate a whole blog post to it soon to give you more details. It is a book for new writers that want to know a little bit about what to do once they have a rough draft written. What are the steps that you need to take which will get it from rough draft to published? Right now I have about 2 chapters left to write for the rough draft. Then revisions begin. I hope to have it self published by May 2020.
6. This summer I will begin writing Of Two Worlds in earnest. This novel has been on my mind for a couple of years now. I have more than a rough outline, but not quite a detailed outline written. I played with a few chapters. There are two main characters who you met in the troll story I got published. I can’t quite decide if it should be told in a tight 3rd person or 1st person. Alternating POV or single POV. I have time to ponder it though for now.

Somewhere in all that, I plan to keep writing a few short stories here and there to play with new ideas.

Can you tell I’m very much an outliner/planner? I have most of 2020 planned already!

What are your accomplishments for 2019 and your goals for 2020? Write a comment below!