#2: Writing Goals

So apparently you're supposed to have these things called "goals" when writing something and it's against the rules to just write willy-nilly, writing a lot one day and nothing the next and moving nowhere towards nothing. At the same time, I don't want to set myself completely unattainable goals, like "write a novel this week." In English classes they ask about your "writing goals" a lot, and they're generally supposed to be things like not using too much passive voice, and using varied sentence structure, and finishing your essays before the bell. But I already do all those things, or at least I think I do, so what should my writing goals be? Up until now whenever I was asked "Did you move towards any of your writing goals in this piece?"and then the dreaded "Explain," my thought process was Ummmmmm ... what were my goals again? Um, hmmm, it was good I guess, whatever, "I moved toward my goals in this piece because it was good. What does that even mean?

But from now on, it's not going to be like that . From now on, I am going to have Goals. Goals, I tell you. GOALS. And my first goal is to write every day. I mean, that's not too hard, right? Just put mechanical pencil to lined paper every day and churn out something that isn't my math homework done two hours before it's due. Unproductive writing, writing that isn't going to be a crappy short story until I read it a few days later and go "Hey, this is crappy!" It'll probably be crappy anyway, but at least I won't be expecting it to become anything. My second goal is to write a story that isn't cliched. That one will, I anticipate, be considerably harder. I have some stuff in mind, and maybe one day it will be an official novel and I will be an official unpublished author. Maybe I can even self-publish an e-book and then beg people on the internet to buy it so I can afford corn flakes and kitty litter for my thirteen cats, which will all be named after long words. I'm a word afficionado, so I can name them things like Sussuration and Persnickity and call them Susie and Percy when I'm not feeling formal. But, I digress. My third and final goal is to stop insulting my own writing so much. By reading this post and the one previous you've probably figured out that I tend to have a rather self-depricating sense of humor. Hopefully, in a few months, this blog will be filled with announcements of my sheer awesomeness....awesomenitude.......whatever. Or at least I will have stopped talking about how much my writing sucks, ie, push myself into total denial. There I go doing it again.
Anyway, here's a picture of a kitten!