Oh, hi there! I'm back with a writing goal for 2021.

So, never get a puppy if you are trying to build a new habit.

Seriously.

On the other hand, if you want to introduce an immediate dose of stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness into your otherwise excellent life, get a puppy.

That's where I've been for the last two month. I adopted Midge, and she reminded me how much work and attention puppies require. My friend, Moose, called it, and he couldn't have been more right. Fortunately, puppies also bring a lot of joy and happiness to the home, and Midge has definitely given us plenty of smiles and laughs over the holiday season, to go along with a lot of cleaning up poop and pee. It's a fair trade, I guess, since the joy will continue and the indoor bathroom cleanup should eventually come to an end.

This is Midge and the babe the day we brought her home.

Meanwhile, I haven' written anything  since the last blog. Between the puppy and the fact that Uber slowed down dramatically during this pandemic stricken holiday season, I really haven't had the time, nor the mental energy, to get myself back to the keyboard. I also let some old habits creep in as forms of stress management, and here were are, two months gone by, two weeks into 2021, and I haven't even set a goal yet. Not a single one.

So here goes, the short and sweet writer goal for 2021. Ready?

- Write a short story every week and submit for publication.

That's really it. I plan on trying to get a new blog streak going, but the primary goal for 2021 is the short story goal. If that's going well, I may be a glutton and add on, but for now I'm keeping it simple. 52 stories in 50 weeks. Yeah, I'm going to make myself make up for the two weeks I did nothing so far this year.

I think this is a great way for me to learn how to be committed to writing and learn a ton about the process, from storytelling to submission to self-publication. I'll be doing my very best to get out of my own way, and the best way I know to do that is to follow Heinlein's Rules of Writing. For those who are unacquainted, those rules are as follows:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you write.

3. You must not edit except to editorial order.

4. You must put what you write on the market.

5. You must keep it on the market until it sells.

Now, there are a few markets for short storied out there still, though not nearly as many as there were ten or twenty years ago. Certainly not as many as there were in the mid to late twentieth century, when a short story writer could make a good living. But there are still some places that accept short fiction submissions. Still, not everything I write will find a market.

That's where self-publishing comes in. Once a career killer, self-publishing has become a legitimate way to build a writing career over the past decade, and is a viable place for short fiction to thrive. So, once a story has made the rounds of the appropriate markets, I'll be putting it up for sale myself on various websites. I'll also be looking to publish collections of stories that are generally the same genre.

One of the things I'm considering is publishing my own monthly magazine, which will include everything I write each month in a collected volume. I'm not ready to take that step just yet. Dean Wesley Smith, a long time fiction writer with hundreds of novels and stories to his credit, publishes his work in a monthly magazine called Smith's Monthly, and even with his writing nd publishing credentials, he has ha trouble keeping up. I'm going to keep that idea on the back burner until I've proven to myself that I can hack the monthly workload.

What I will do, at the end of the year, is compile any stories that I self publish into an annual collection, along with the covers I will have to do for them, and any accompanying blog posts that relate to the stories themselves, the writing of them, the marketing for them, or just some side notes. That's right, there will be a 2021 Cleary Annual Writing Collection, and I hope it will be the first of many.

That's all for now. I'm glad to be back at this keyboard. It's been bothering me, being away. The deadline for the first short story of 2021 is midnight on Sunday, so I have six days to get the year off to a slightly belated writing bang!

See you tomorrow.