I posted a blog previously of my big plans for 2023 and needless to say failed in many of the categories. Sometimes as an upcoming, independent writer (with a full time job and family commitments) the best laid plans don’t always come off. This hasn’t detracted me from setting goals for this year, and we will see how many of them actually come off.
1 – Blog more often. Between, and during writing projects, I will aim to put a blog up on this website. I will try and blog at least once a month with a mixture of writing updates, desert island series blogs, top 10s and general nonsense that I hope you may enjoy. This blog covers January and I plan to do a weekly blog in February discussing my four published novels and providing a bit of an insight to the creation of them.
2 – Finish my novella. I started a novella last year, which began as an idea on how I could highlight (and hopefully raise some money for) a charity. The story is really coming together and I’ve now passed the 15k word mark against a target of c25k words. The novella includes a detective character that I have kicked around, almost since I started writing, called James Slim. In fact, he is in the short story ‘A Strange Kind of Love’ which you can read on this website under the ‘Short Stories’ tab.
3 – Write and Publish DI Christie Book 4. When my other writing goals for last year mainly failed, I did manage to get the third DI Christie book written and published. It was enjoyable reacquainting myself with the characters and I immediately started thinking about the next one. It may be unsustainable to write and publish a Christie novel every year, but I would like to get to the point where I could do this every second year with other writing projects undertaken in-between.
4 – Agent Planning and Novel Structuring – I had suggested that I wanted to start to query agents and this is still a major goal of mine. This year, I will be celebrating a significant birthday so I want to do it during this birthday year (it’s not until October, so this goal will run from October this year until October 2025). Before approaching agents, I need to have planned and started the novel that I wish to put out for consideration. I’ve a few WIPs on the go and one big idea for what could be the start of a new series if successful, so we will see which lane I decide to go down.
5 – Publish at Least One More Short Story – I’ve a short story that has been on hold with a published for a while, so I may need to re-visit this and put it out for other consideration. The story was my first attempted at a ‘locked room mystery’, which I have always enjoyed reading, so it would be a shame if no one got to read it.
So that’s the plan for the year. If you’ve read this far, please subscribe to my blog so that you get notifications when new ones appear. I promise to do everything I can to fulfil the monthly blog promise, even if the other plans go a bit wrong…
Thanks again for reading my blog. You can support this website by purchasing one of my books under the ‘Books’ tab. A new feature of this website is the option to purchase books on my ‘Reading List’ tab. This is an Associate agreement, with any funds raised used to maintain this website. Thank you!
Ross Alexander Writer 