OK. It’s early, I mean really early. In the interests of not going back to work feeling like I’ve just had a bucket of cold water dumped over me I’m attempting to set my bodyclock back to work time.

During the holidays I tend to revert to my natural rythymn which is damned near nocturnal. This doesn’t work normally as I simply don’t have enough fuel in my tank by the time I get home from work to stay up late and invariably other things get in the way of writing, whether that’s TV, the pub or just needing to kip. This leads to binge writing that, although I enjoy nearly as much as binge reading, doesn’t lend itself to constant progress. Hence, I’m reinstituting my pre-work writing session.

In other New Year related madness: I am directing more attention to the blog this month. That means I will be testing the impact of a post a day for a month and I’ll also be running some additional marketing activity to see if I can bring in more targeted traffic, I’ll report on those in February. An obvious question in upping the content frequency is: How many of you want to see Columbo Villain of the Week return? Answers in the comments thread.

I didn’t really intend to do a resolutions post this year but I seem to have drifted into one simply by way of waking up and thus revealing one of my blog strategies. That being that I’ll be writing short posts to warm up in the morning. This stops me having to rewrite the first five hundred words I work on each morning and helps the old synapses get going in a more conducive fashion than downing my own body weight in coffee. I digress. Resolutions are just the bastard cousins of goals and I thought my writing ones might be of interest. Actually, that’s a lie. I thought by posting them here it might keep me honest. Here goes:

– Obtain a story placement (flash, short story or novel) for money (anything from $5 up)
– Get an agent for my novel length work
– Get a pro-sale (5c per word) in any fiction market (short story, book or flash).

And the tactics:

– Finish the final polish on The Scarred God and submit to agents.
– Finish the second draft of Forever and test with two readers.
– Complete the first draft of either L.o.T.S or U.F.T.T. Or put another way complete a new novel in first draft.
– Complete in longer form and submit The Point of Roughness. This was my original flash idea for seasonal, positive SF.
– Complete in longer form and submit Untitled Sword Story. This was the story I drafted at M’s birthday weekend. May be hard to place.
– In 2008 I got closest to a sale with a story I wrote with a specific market in mind and so: write at least three short stories with specific markets in mind. (one for each market): Weird Tales, Murky Depths, Fantasy Magazine.
– Reduce resubmission time to 24hrs on average.
– Grow the daily hits on this blog back up to a daily average of 500.

Now I just need to get on with it.