All around the Internet, writers everywhere are gearing up. They’re cracking knuckles and sharpening pencils, clearing their desks and adjusting their computer chairs.

All over, everywhere, anyone who’s calling themselves a writer in 2016 is getting ready to do one thing.

Write.

2016 has unofficially become The Year of Writing.

For me, this translated into the first New Year’s resolutions I’ve made for many, many years. Generally, I don’t make them because they fall flat. When the initial excitement wears off, we have nothing left. Sometimes, we can form a new habit, but most times, we just…stop.

So I try not to make resolutions.

But I want this. I want this bad. So there are two things I’m using to move this thing along. A challenge, and a streak.

My resolution is to write for at least one hour every day. If I have more free time to do it, fine, I’ll do it. And I want to make sure I take that BICFOK time. (If you don’t know, BICFOK means “Butt In Chair, Fingers On Keyboard”.) The real way prolific writers produce volumes of words is to take adequate BICFOK so those words materialize.

I don’t do this. I finished a novel, and then sat back and celebrated.

For seven months. And then I was so blocked I couldn’t start another story.

So, now I’ve got another story moving along, creeping. I’m not breaking any speed records with my producion, but my goal is to have produced at least 300K words in 2016 by the time the ball begins its descent in NYC. When the dust settles, that’s more words than I’ve ever produced before, bar none.

It will mean spending less time on Facebook and here, on my blog. But that won’t necessarily mean the blog will die. I still plan to produce fiction which I publish here for my faithful readers, and then I’ll put it on Amazon and/or other vendors for the rest of the world. That will give me lots of practice with blurbs and let me use my cover template a bunch too.

I’m not promising anything, but that 300K means I could potentially get between four and six novels written, and subdivide it anyway. But doing this 300K will be easier and harder than anything I’ve ever done before, so I hope to garner as much support as possible before fizzling out.

Anyway, that’s the goal for this year, along with at least two workshops (online) from Dean Wesley Smith and WMG Publishing. They’re expensive, though, so I may settle for an online lecture or two instead.

And now that I have a better idea how writers should be approaching craft books, I look forward to the learning curve for the first time in a while. Becoming a great storyteller is hard work, and I want to be considered among the best.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on here. Slower blogging frequency, but I should up the word production by orders of magnitude everywhere else.

I’ll keep everyone here apprised of my progress! I hope to jump start this challenge with a streak – it’s already two in a row! Woo! Uh…yeah, I missed January 1. Heh.

So what about you? Any reading, writing, or movie goals for you this year?

-jdt-