YEAH! I have concrete goals!

This time I am going to do this right. It is the start of a new round of ROW 80 – which stands for Round of Words in 80 Days, by the way, in case you aren’t a regular Rounder. This Round begins July 1 and 80 days would put the end around September 20, which is awesomely cool, because I am supposed to go on vacation the following week. If I complete all of my goals by then, I will truly and totally take the week off. (Any of you who know me, know that won’t happen, but a girl can dream. My husband is probably going to dream that will happen too.)

I.                    READING –

A.      Daily goal

1.       Read two other blog posts a day.

2.       Read in at least one of the three books I am reading. (I am usually reading one fiction, one non-fiction and a devotional at a time.)

B.      Weekly goal

1.       Do research on my novel.

2.       Start research for my next novel. (I just thought I would throw that out there. I really need to be thinking about my next book though.)

C.      Goals for the Round

1.    Have finished reading five books. (Not as lofty a goal as one might think because I am   counting the three books I am currently reading.)

II.                  WRITING

A.      Daily goal

1.       Work on something for two hours a day.

a.       Write on my novel

b.      Write my blog posts

c.       Work on paperwork for the nonprofit organization (more on that further along)

B.      Goals for the Round

1.       Have finished my novel.

2.       Have finished all of the paperwork for the nonprofit.

III.                REACHING

A.      Weekly goal

1.       Comment on two other blog posts.

2.       Research markets for an hour.

3.       Keep up on social media, spending not more than a few hours a week on it.

B.      Goals for the Round

1.       Have submitted three pieces somewhere.

2.       Book signing at a local library (which someone else is setting up, so I don’t know much about it yet.)

3.       Have survived my speaking engagements at two writers’ conferences.

IV.                PERSONAL (goals by the end of the round)

A.      Running

1.       Have run in the 5K on July 4.

2.       Continue running a few times a week just to improve my time and stay in shape.

3.       Maybe run another 5K if I find a convenient one.

B.      Family

1.       Have settled my mom into better housing. (I know I mentioned before that I won’t talk about her.)

2.       Have planned that vacation with Hubby in September.

C.      Nonprofit

1.       Have submitted all of the required paperwork to all the places it needs to go.

2.       By September 20, have become a 401(c)3 nonprofit organization. (This is probably my loftiest and least likely to be achieved goal because for all this to happen, no matter how hard we work on this, we have to wait on government agencies for things to progress.)

A little about the nonprofit, since I see I haven’t expounded on it lately. As you know, I was in Kenya the first two weeks of May and my daughter remained there, planning to come home the end of July. While she is there, she is mostly working on finding projects which our nonprofit can tackle, as well as researching all the steps it takes to become a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Our tentative name is Tumaini Volunteers, Inc. Tumaini means ‘hope’ in Swahili, so our tagline will be something like “building hope for a better tomorrow”. But it is all still in the planning stages.

So, there are my goals for the next 80 days. Time to dig in!