I figure it’s time to start talking to my visitors here at Charley Marsh Books, so one of my goals for this year is to post regularly. The big question for me is what to talk about. It seems foolish for me to talk much about writing as there are others who do it so much better than I can. I’ll talk about my books when they are released, but what else?

And then I thought about what I look for when I visit an author’s site. I want to know more about them, who they are as people, why they write what they do.

Being a private (VERY private) person means this will take some thought and effort on my part. I am going to take baby steps and see what happens. Start slow and get loosened up a little, so to speak.

So here goes.

As we have wrapped up 2016 and are into 2017 I hope that you have set goals for yourself for the year. Goals are important. They help us accomplish our dreams. Goals and dreams are two very different things. We have control over our goals, none over our dreams.

For example, perhaps your dream is to win the local triathlon. You have no control over winning such a difficult race. BUT you can set goals that will get you into the race and perhaps help you win. A goal would be running x miles one day, biking x miles the second day, and swimming x miles the third day to get you fit enough to compete.

Repeat until eventually your goal would change to doing those activities on the same day. You have control over the goals, on getting fit enough to compete, not the winning. That will depend on the other participants, and you have zero control over them.

For me, I have set goals in three areas of my life for 2017: writing, personal, and business. For writing I have a goal to write six new books this year and attend several workshops I want to take to further my craft. I’m a big believer in always learning, but that’s another post.

In order to do that I added up the approximate number of words I need to complete each book, then divided that number by 1,000 (the number of words I average in an hour) so I know how many total hours I have to devote to writing in order to complete six books.

I divided the total writing hours needed by 52 weeks to get the hours I need to put in each week. Divided that by seven to get my writing hours per day. I now have a manageable daily goal to reach my big goal of six new books in 2017.

For me, it helps to break the large goals into smaller, more manageable goals. These smaller goals give me a way to check in and see how I’m doing so when 1/1/2018 rolls around I’m not saying, “Where the hell did the time go? I only wrote three books!”

O.K. That wasn’t too bad. And hopefully I said something that will inspire or help you to set a goal that will help you achieve your dream.

Charley