{"id":1306,"date":"2019-08-13T11:58:50","date_gmt":"2019-08-13T15:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/?p=1306"},"modified":"2019-08-13T11:58:50","modified_gmt":"2019-08-13T15:58:50","slug":"new-smart-goals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/13\/new-smart-goals\/","title":{"rendered":"New smart goals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I hit 150 rejections<\/a> for the FFY <\/a>last Monday. I am well on my way to 200 submissions for 2019 (currently at 133).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I need a new challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cutie’s suggestion was “editing” and while, yes, I certainly need to get my editing done (especially since I hate it and will do almost anything to put it off), it’s hard to break down “editing” into a small-steps-every-week challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So currently my new placeholder FFY goal is to edit Space Crazies<\/em> and get it ready for querying and also revise Embers <\/em>to the point where I can send it for beta-reading by next August. But it… doesn’t feel very SMART and that’s bothering me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMART is a goal evaluation method which stands for “Specific, Measureable, Achieveable, Realistic, Timely” and it’s S-M that “edit Space Crazies and Embers” falls down on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all, it’s hard to measure progress when you’re editing. A simple word- or page-count tally doesn’t work because a lot of the time you’re flipping back and forth between pages, or spending 90% of one day’s work on a single scene while the next day might breeze through a chapter with no effort needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I was line-editing<\/strong> I could make that<\/em> a SMART goal, because it really is just dividing number of pages to do by the days available. But Space Crazies<\/em> is all big-picture stuff, and Embers <\/em>needs the whole package.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not sure what to do. For the moment I have the editing package in Space Crazies to work through, and Pat has very helpfully included a Revision List, so for the foreseeable future I can just work my way down the list. It’s just that I know myself enough to know that what motivates me is a filled out graph or chart, and right now I don’t have that carrot to dangle in front of me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s odd to think that I am more frustrated by that notion–“I can’t see my progress during editing”–than I ever was with any of my writing goals (“Write 50K in a month but only M-Fs? Cool. Let me mark up a calendar with projected word counts and lay in a bucket of treats for hitting targets”) but that’s just how I roll, and why collecting data about one’s work habits is the first step to figuring out a way past a blocker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess more data is needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So in the meantime I’ll proceed with Space Crazies and keep track of how it goes. Maybe something will present itself out of the data or a more experienced editor will point something out. Stay tuned! And if you have any ideas yourself, feel free to leave them in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I need a new goal for a new fiscal year, and it needs to be SMART<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,213,8],"tags":[194,202,214,83],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-editing","category-productivity","tag-developmental-editing","tag-goalsnotdreams","tag-smart","tag-space-crazies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1384,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions\/1384"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}