Goals for 2012

With all the reflecting on 2011 out of the way, it’s time to start looking at my plans for 2012.

In all honesty, they’re quite simple plans, albeit ones requiring a lot of hard work.

Complete the 2012 Virgin London Marathon

Most people either laughed at me or passed confused glances my way when I told them early last year that I planned to run the London Marathon in 2012.

I couldn’t blame them really; I was never really the most physically active person in the world.

Alas, I applied anyway, and as 2011 began gradually winding to a close, I received a letter offering me a Golden Bond place to run the marathon on behalf of Terrence Higgins Trust.

I’ll be blogging a lot more on my training efforts very soon, but needless to say it’s been hard, yet ultimately very rewarding work so far, and I’m looking forward to pounding the streets of London come April.

If you do want to go ahead and sponsor me (and I'd love it if you did) you can do so at my Virgin Money Giving page.

Write 300,000 words
Until this year, the only writing-related goals I’ve set have been to complete specific, usually short-term, projects.

And that’s where I’ve been going wrong.

In not setting a clear goal like this, I’ve been letting my writing output slip over the last 18-24 months, concentrating instead on other projects which, whilst fun, were not what I’d always planned to do with my life.

Ever since I was a child the only career I had in mind was one involving sticking lots of words down on a page, and though I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities I’ve had which have very little to do with writing, it’s time I got back to that.

I got the idea to write 300,000 words from an excellent post by Chris Guillebeau. At first, I was going to be really ambitious and aim for 500,000 words but hey, I’m a writer not a mathematician, and trying to divide 500,000 words by 12 months proved more challenging than it was worth!

Spend the summer in the USA
I don’t want to talk too much about this just yet as I have nothing confirmed yet, but one of my main goals is to spend at least the summer months over in my beloved Minnesota working on a couple of exciting things.

It’s early days yet, but I’ll have more news once I’m back from a short trip there in early February.

I also have a couple of smaller goals that you’ll probably see me talking about over the next twelve months, but these are my three main priorities for the year ahead.

Be sure to come back in December to see how I did!