2024-2025 Eeveeyear Goals

It wasn't until I directly compared the two spreadsheets that I realized I didn't, at least in relative terms, actually do worse this year than last. It hasn't felt like it was going well, and my wrap-up post from a year ago talked about being under 50%, without, apparently, mentioning that one goal actually came in under 25%. That goals was New Cards, which was set absurdly high, but still. The goal I did worst on this year still came in at 29.22%, so I suppose that's something. I'm also not sure I have a lot of useful insights this year, but we'll see what we can come up with. 

Core Goals

This is a blog about books and writing. I am, in some ways, a person about books and writing. I'm still hoping to eventually make, if not a living, at least, y'know, money as a novelist. So the goals that directly support that do feel more important than the ones that don't, that are here to give more strictly recreational activities a place in my life, or to shore up areas where I struggle with being a corporeal being. This also includes the goals that have been with us the longest, and that means we get to do graphs. 

I wrote fewer words of fiction this year than last year. I don't like that. I really wanted there to be continuous improvement on that one.  Apparently, I also wrote fewer words, by a substantially wider margin, last year than the year before that. Regression line indicates the trend is still basically upwards, which is something, I suppose. I wish I felt like I understood what happened here, why I haven't been able to keep up the 2021-2022 numbers. I thought last year was just the move, which took a lot out of me mentally, emotionally, and chronologically, but I didn't move this year. I don't know, maybe I'm still recovering, but I'm hoping to fiddle with the knobs some this year and see if we can't get back to a more respectable output level. I know part of the thing is some of my freelance work straight up getting harder, but I can't really do anything about that, so we'll have to see what else we can adjust. 

I read exactly as many books this year as I did the one before, 50, which is, y'know, that's almost a book a week, it's respectable, but it's not what I hoped for, nor is it really enough to sustain the level of creative output for which I'm aiming. I think part of the problem, for this and the writing, might just be that living with so many other people makes it harder to really put in the time on these essentially solitary activities. I don't like being unsociable when there's social to be had (I am perhaps the only extroverted writer in existence, and this has its downsides), and there is a lot more social to be had now than there was where I lived previously. I do think I've figured out how to stop game manuals from slowing me down, but I only figured it out part way through this year. Tracking pages of game reading, directly, rather than only counting them when I finish, means I can make some progress without bringing everything else to a halt, and that I'm not forced to choose between slogging through a game I'm no longer interested in and sacrificing the progress I've made so far.

We're dropping handwritten pages, as I said we might. One of my two most active fiction projects, I write exclusively on my phone, and the other primarily on the computer, so it's not doing much to facilitate progress in that area anymore, and needing to work on paper has at this point unambiguously become a deterrent to actually working on blog posts. On the subject of which, I wrote one (1) more blog post this year than last, 17 instead of 16. We're gonna get back to regular output, okay? We are. 

Most of these goals, and the ones that attend upon them, have at this point, of necessity, been pinned. That is to say, rather than setting them via the usual formula, which would result in unacceptably low targets from which it would likely take years to recover, I set them directly, based on what I hope to accomplish or, where fiction writing is concerned, what I think will set an appropriate scale for what I hope to accomplish. I put blog posts at 50+1d10 and got 57 again. This naturally puts the blog reading goal at 570+1d10, in this case, 576. Similarly, the goal for fiction writing remains 60,000 words, so the target for reading must be 60,000+1d100 pages, in this case 60033. Book reading goal is 111 this year - I did it as 100+2d6, so we'll see how that goes. I'm honestly sort of expecting the book target to naturally land where it needs to be now that I've got the goal for pages read set in a reasonable way that supports my goals. This was the worst year on record for rereading, which again I think might be related to spending more time actually talking to other people, an activity notoriously difficult to reconcile with listening to audiobooks. This, too, has been set manually, at 81 (75+1d10). I'll see where I can get with remembering to put on an audiobook any time I'm doing something compatible with it and not currently caught up on rereads (if I am, I should put on a podcast). The reading and writing time goals are not pinned, but they are intertwined. Rather than letting each one develop separately, and then aiming for 125% of prior year average, I calculate as though I were doing that and then average those, so the goals are the same every year even if I didn't accomplish the same amount. This year, it's 1007 hours each, which is a hair over 3 hours a day.

Fanfiction, nonfiction, and short fiction aren't really core, but they're the other reading and writing things, so here we are. I'm continuing to let nonfiction writing do what it's gonna do, for the most part - I do have a couple longer-form nonfiction projects where the additional pressure to get things done might be helpful, but it's as much to check whether, when I'm not writing a lot of fiction, it's because I'm writing a lot of nonfiction. And it supports good length on blog posts, especially in the absence of tracking handwritten pages. We've also added a nonfiction reading goal, currently set at an almost totally arbitrary 928 pages, which is in the same kind of "see how it goes" space from which the originally nonfiction target of 15,000 words arose. I'm hoping to discover if there's a relationship between how much nonfiction I read and how much nonfiction I can write, as there seems to be for fiction and blog posts. Of course, blog posts are part of nonfiction, so one of the things we'll learn this year is my level of patience for using the print function to check the page count on the blog posts I read. Separating fanfiction and short fiction reading largely accomplished what I wanted it to, even if I didn't do as much of either as I'd have liked. I have discovered something of an issue with longform fics-in-progress, because I don't like to count them until they're actually done and I've read the whole thing, but that means quite a lot of reading might not get counted in the year in which it occurs, and also what if they never get finished. Depending upon how this year goes, I may end up counting them as fic read when I get caught up, and potentially subsequently counting each chapter as an additional fic read (since a complete 100 word drabble also counts as a fic, this isn't unreasonable), and only counting it as a book read once either the whole thing is done or I have reason to believe it never will be, but we're gonna give it another year first. Fanfiction writing, measured by chapters posted, went pretty well, I think, and while I didn't hit the goal, the one of the coming year will be higher, which is...not the case for quite a few of my goals. I've gotten kind of into translating pop music from the aughties into the Old Tongue from Wheel of Time - if that becomes enough of a Thing, I may have to make it a separate goal, as the translations take less time, and use a different skill set, from most prose fiction writing.

Non-core goals

The overhead projector that I used for most of my video gaming and some of my tv watching broke this spring, which kinda put a cramp in my style in those areas. We're mostly up and running with using the living room tv instead, but we can't use that for the more difficult stuff in Hollow Knight because the switch controllers lag a little, and so does the connection between the switch and the tv. Nature of the physical space, and not a lot to be done about it except hope that increased efforts to make money will make it possible for us to repair the projector sometime this year. Time spent playing tabletop games (and, to a lesser extent sewing) was lower than it might have been because my GM's summer hiatus was both delayed and extended due to circumstances beyond either of our control. And that's as much as I think we need to say about how none of this is my fault, yeah?

I don't think we need to get into every single goal here. You can see the numbers for yourselves. Webcomics was one of only two goals I actually hit this year, and to be honest I have no real idea how that happened. Learning python is going very slowly, although I'm working on a dice calculator for my partner's ttrpg system, which at least gives me a project to learn on. I was also able to get in a lot of extra Skills at the last minute because one of my freelance projects required me to learn R. I was told that R is "statistics software" like SPSS (which I also don't know how to use, to be clear). It is not. It's an entire damn programming language, in which I am now marginally competent. There's even a chance this will help me with the statistical operations I need to learn to perform in Python. This year I will probably also install RPGmaker and start playing around with that, and maybe with some tools for Pokemon romhacks. I wish I'd managed to listen to more podcasts, but we're just gonna see if Trying Harder works for that. 

I think I've got the TCGOs targets about right now. They're gonna move some every year, of course, but what happened this year feels reasonable, manageable, and like it's keeping the place this thoroughly unproductive activity holds in my life both open and contained, which is what it was supposed to do. Music, on the other hand... Part of the issue with this one was the social thing, that it's hard to do something that benefits from headphones while interacting with other people, but also, listening to new music is harder when there's a bookkeeping element involved. I'm gonna keep it as a goal for this year, but after that we're going to evaluate whether it's doing more good than harm. Walking was straight up undercounted because I'm still using Pokemon Go to track distance, and it had an update that disconnected the function to count walking when the app wasn't open and it took me a while to notice, but I have also been walking less. Duolingo is the only non-core goal that got pinned - I made very little progress this year, and I don't want to risk letting the situation get worse. I am also looking for a different language learning app with a similar structure, as I'd really prefer not to support their AI nonsense, but most of the ones I tried are expensive, are bad, or don't have Russian as a language option. 

I got fewer little administrative tasks accomplished this year than I would have liked, but as a goal it is basically working how it's supposed to. The only difficulty is that it interacts a little oddly with Dracula Daily, and even in that area it's more of a blessing than a hindrance, if only because it prompts me to check my email more often than I otherwise might. 

New Goals

We already talked, back up in the discussion of core goals, about the addition of nonfiction reading. The only other thing I'm really adding this year is goals for cleaning and organizing my living space. Progress units for cleaning include: putting away a load of something (laundry, dishes), returning five objects that are not part of a load to their permanent homes, putting an object in its permanent home for the first time, retiring a temporary container (e.g. a cardboard box), and setting up a new permanent container. There's also a time goal to go with them. I have no idea whether either number was set in a good place, but there's no real way to find out except to give it a try and hope for the best. 

Potential goals that were considered and discarded for this year are TCGO wins, about which I didn't feel confident in setting even a tentative target, and which in any case are not really sufficiently under my control, and working with the dog, which I do want to do more but is a little fiddly and contingent, and about which again I had no real idea where to set such a goal, or even what a reasonable non-time unit might look like. Either of these might be considered for future years if I can get my head around them a little better. 

I don't feel like I really have any useful insights about my progress this year, anything you might be able to apply to your own work or even your understanding of mine, for whatever that may be worth to you. It didn't go well, but it did go. And I finished Ghani and started on its sequal, Kozatin, so there's that. Next post will be more Dresden Files, and it's gonna have to be soon if I want to stay on track. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The things!