It's Friday! Are you surprised to see me here? Are you surprised that I spell "surprise" wrong every single time I type it? [Because I do. Every. Single. Time. Stupid in-cognito "r."] Anyway, I'm usually a Tuesday/Thursday blogger, mostly because I can't wrangle myself together enough on Sundays to have a post polished and ready to go by Monday at 8am.
But this week, get excited, because you get the exclusive privilege of reading an EXTRA post this week.
[This is the part where you get excited. I'll wait. If it helps, think about the fact that it's Friday. Or cupcakes. Ok, moving on.]
I haven't done a Finish Year update in a while, but I thought since I've made some progress I'd share what I've been up to.
So if you haven't read my previous posts on Finish Year, essentially it's a campaign of sorts started by Jon Acuff in which he challenged his readers (and anyone else who wanted to participate) to pick a handful of things they wanted to finish this year. Not start---finish. Because starting is the easy part. Finishing is the part everyone dreads.
It's a new take on New Year's Resolutions, but a much more practical approach. The idea is not to pick too many things. Pick a few. And to pick things you actually WANT to have finished. Not things you just feel like you should finish.
Anyway, I picked out five things to finish this year. Here they are, along with the progress I've made on each one:
Finish "The Empress" by the end of February 2012. ["The Empress" is a fictional short story I started as a contest entry.] I've totally failed on the "by the end of February" part of this goal. No excuse except for the fact that I'm kind of tired of doing it. But I know I need to finish it, if nothing else, for the discipline. I've finished a complete beginning-to-end draft (I think), but it still needs a ton of editing. The fact that I keep reading it over and editing along the way doesn't help. Anyway, it's coming along but I haven't been actively pursuing this goal much lately. Time to get on it, I suppose!
Write (and publish) an e-book. I succeeded at this one! Once I finally was able to get some feedback on my draft, I ended up moving forward pretty quickly. I formatted it, turned it into a PDF and made it available on my blog in about a week. I released it a couple weeks ago. I'm still excited about it, and if you're interested in reading it, all you have to do is sign up for my email subscription list over on the side bar or by clicking here. (You'll only get an email if I wrote a new post that day.) In the confirmation email there will be a link to download it for free. The ebook is called "What the Whole World Longs For: A Manifesto on Commitment." It's something I really believe in, and I hope you like it!
Finish reading the Harry Potter series. I am ALMOST done with this goal, which I'm proud of but also pretty sad about. By the time I reached the fifth book, they had finally become available in Kindle format which has been AWESOME. Lugging those books to and fro was getting to be a struggle. Kind of. Anyway, I am currently (according to my Kindle) about 40% through with Deathly Hallows. Yeah, I'm definitely going to have a mourning period. I'm not ready to talk about that yet.
Finish two other books besides HP. Still working on Harry Potter, so I haven't gotten to this yet. Although I have finished two books for our community group, so I've kind of already succeeded at this goal. But since they weren't really voluntary reads, I'm not counting them.
Write guest posts for other blogs or online publications. This goal has shifted into something I wasn't expecting, but it has been awesome. I have been writing for a website called TV Asylum (a safe place for the TV-obsessed), along with a host of other hilarious writers. It's been a lot of fun to find a group of people who like to run their own commentary on TV shows like I do and like discussing TV shows in-depth. If you haven't gotten a chance yet, check out TV Asylum. There are at least three new posts per day, filled with magic and laughter except without the magic. Click the link on my sidebar to view the posts I've written so far (my posts usually go up on Wednesdays). You can also follow TV asylum on Twitter or Facebook to get updates when new posts go up.
So that's where I am! If you set goals for this year or have been doing Finish Year, how are you doing?