I'm shamelessly stealing this idea from Tim Pratt (congrats by the way on the nomination) who admits that he stole it as well (and Sarah stole it too....). It's about goal setting - not health and nutrition goals (perish the thought) but writing goals. The idea is to write down what you want long-term, with the theory that it just might help to keep your eyes (and heart) aimed at something. According to Tim:

Is there a value in setting goals like this? Well, maybe, if you keep in mind that there are some goals you can't realistically control, but having something to shoot for can provide some guidance, and maybe even a beacon in dark times...

I don't usually do this and don't foresee making this site all about what I want to write or think about writing or being all full of writerly angst (again, perish the thought), but I never thought I would finish a book or obtain an agent or have my work read by editors at major publishing houses. So I'm already at the top of the mountain I envisioned climbing five years ago when I started writing the AK flying book. Now is a good time to find other mountains. Here's the ones I'd like to scale:

1. Write a haunted house short story. (Since I actually lived in a haunted house when I was very young, this is quite manageable. We had the voices in the long dark hall, the mold that could not be cleaned off the walls, the bizarre attractiveness to natural forces, electronics going on and off by themselves, my mother hung crucifixes over out beds for protection - yeah, I can do this.)

2. Complete memoir of the four years working for the Company. (My agent wants an AK aviation memoir. I resisted the idea of a memoir for awhile as I really don't have an exciting enough life to write one, but I finally figured out that for a brief period of time I was in an environment that is pretty cool and crazy. So I want to write this as a memoir of a certain period in terms of my personal thoughts/ opinons but also equal parts history and observation of how hard it is to work in a career that has some mythic status attached to it. I promise it will be way more interesting than I just made it sound!)

3. Complete and sell the YA urban fantasy. (This is the tough one right now. I am plugging away although it seems like I just keep working from the beginning and middle rather than moving towards the end. I almost wonder if what I envision as the setting for the middle might end up where the final chapters occur. It's weird. But I still feel pretty good about it and want to get it done. Soon.)

4. If YA urban fantasy gets any kind of positive feedback at all, proceed with second YA urban fantasy. (I'm keeping this to myself for now.)

5. Finish off trilogy of books on AK flying by writing novel about pilot who crashes. (I have wanted to do this for awhile - write a book from the perspective of a pilot who crashes in a pilot-error crash and goes through the pressure of the whole investigation process. I don't think nonflying types - and especially those who haven't worked in an airline - have a clue what a federal accident investigation is like. I'm not looking to write a dead passenger book as then it would be about the passengers and that has been done many times before - I want it to be about a pilot, why he crashed - how a good pilot crashes - and what it does to you when you thought you were the best and still screwed up.)

6. Write more essays. I like my piece that was in Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and I have an essay due out in the next issue of Elysian Fields Quarterly about my father and baseball. I'd like to complete at least three a year, and work on trying to get them published. (Although publication is not the goal here, just completing the essays would be great.)

7. My pie-in-the-sky dream/goal would be to write a comic book or graphic novel. The obvious subject would be Alaska flying, but it doesn't have to be that. I also always wanted to be a girl detective; it would be fun to at least have a hand at creating one.

And that's it, which is really a lot when I look at it here but pretty much all of them aren't outside the realm of possibility. Heck, when I was in college I wanted to bench press my body weight. If I could do that, then this stuff is a piece of cake!