First of all, I know that it’s February. It may seem too late to announce my writing goals for 2017 now, but since I want to participate in Wordbound, I might as well complete them all. (At least that’s the grand plan. Let’s see how this turns out.)

Wordbound is a term used to describe this really cool project kickstarted by Kristina Horner. The idea is, she will be posting new writing prompts every Wednesday all year long in order to encourage writers all around the globe to write more. You will be given a week to complete the writing prompt (until just before the next prompt is announced).

I think the beauty of this project is that we are not alone in doing this, kind of like how NaNoWriMo always feels like a joint project even though the novel writing process itself is a solitary effort. What’s more important is that we get to have something to write about every week. And what are writers if we don’t write as frequently as we can?

Not only that, Wordbound will also be retweeting your submission on their official twitter account. So on top of getting back to writing regularly, people who follow the Wordbound account can also read your submission and give comments, feedbacks, and just be nice to each other. You will have to agree with me: productivity + feedback + making new friends = a must try, hands down.

So unsurprisingly, I will be jumping into the bandwagon. We all knew what happened to my writing muse and productivity in my previous post. And in order to get in shape for writing as soon as possible, I thought it is a good idea to start with the basics once more: writing more stuff.

More specifically, posting more regularly on my blog.

Also writing for my upcoming novel project, which has been delayed for an eternity.

I will try to keep this blogpost as minimalist as possible, since there will be tons of writings in the future. So instead of bombarding you with paragraphs of writing goals and why I thought it was a good idea to put them up on the website, I’d do this instead.

Alicia Lidwina’s 2017 Personal Writing Goals:

1. Populate my Alicia Lidwina blog. Yes, populate this blog with more posts.
2. Write a new novel with Indonesia as the setting.
3. Challenge myself into writing 100 poems in a year.
4. Challenge myself into participating NaNoWriMo 2017, after 3 consecutive failures.
5. Write something outside my usual genre. (I’m thinking of comedy. What do you think?)
6. Fill in my personal journal every day.

And although the Wordbound prompt didn’t specify for it, I will also include my 2017 Reading Goals.

It is not completely unrelated, if you think about it. Reading is to writers like listening to good music for musicians, after all.

Alicia Lidwina’s 2017 Personal Reading Goals:

1. Read 100 books in a year.
2. Read at least 30 non-fiction books from that stash.
3. Read at least 5 books related to writing as a craft.
4. Only buy 1 new books for every 3 books that I’ve read. (This way I can control my budget and what goes into my bookshelves)
5. Organize my personal library, little by little, as I read through the year.

As you can see, the two lists are not very extensive. I try to keep it as realistic as I thought it would be by not exaggerating or overestimating my abilities. While reading 500 books seems like a necessary goal in order to decrease the tower of books I have not read, it is not realistic. For example, if I have enough time to read 500 books in a year, I’d rather use the time to write and do my other hobbies.

So that’s my personal goals. I just hope the doing part will be as easy as the writing the goal part.

(We all know it won’t).

Love,

Alicia