I feel like I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again:
I loves me some new year’s resolutions.
I love taking a good hard look at myself and seeing where I’m lacking, what I’m good at, what I suck and what I rock at. You ain’t livin’ if you ain’t evaluatin’ right Dr. Cox? (really starts at :17)
Damn straight. You only have to answer to one person: You.
That being said, this goes beyond the resolutions into the “ohh he’s one of those” territories.
I pulled out my trusty 5 year plan that sits comfortably in my fat wallet and decided it was time for a review. I like to pull it out from time to time to make sure I’m on track or at the very least, evaluating where my head was at back then compared to where it is now and then change a few things if need be.
I composed this sucker when I was but a lad of 33 in 2019. Back in the middle of making Long Walks on the Beach, just beginning to toy with the idea of turning a tv pilot into a book, and considering what it might actually be like to try turning our finalist TV pilot Forge into a comic book as well as other goals.
Looking through it now (IT’S PRIVATE) I see that only a few things have changed; the biggest change coming in the form of moving up the ladder at work and that has definitely helped to change my worldview a bit. Okay, a lot. But for the better!
For the purpose of this post and truly this blog, I want to share how I structure the ole 5 year plan and share a few of my writing goals for when I hit the big 40. If you’d like to craft one of your own, I broke things down into 6 categories:
Personal
This is where I put my hopes for my family, health, and faith life.
Career
Points about where I’d like to be and a price point of where I’d like to be at.
Writing
Specific goals for writing projects and self querying to follow-up with how things turned out.
Living
Location location location!
Financial
Ayyeee must be the money and the debt and the mortgage and the–
Travel
I have a goal of hitting all 50 states and every continent. 5 states to go!
So those are the six subjects that I focus on.
Now let’s get specific to the writing stuff. As I pivot the writing to focus on authoring (screenwriting will never die!) I’m concentrating on book count and building a brand. I have a very strange hope that I’ll have close to 20 books written in the next 5 years and 5 more badass feature specs. To that end I’ll be looking for anthologies to submit short stories to, building a newsletter, launching that first series by the end of the year and so forth.
It’s funny. The older I get, the more I see that I really didn’t quite know what I was after in my 20s. I genuinely feel like I now have a strong sense of direction that I didn’t have back then. I knew what I wanted, I suppose, but I didn’t really have the steps to get there.
After the writing seminar I attended, I feel like I have a clear direction and I’m looking forward to carrying that out.
More to come,
~Nic
