Another year begins, and that’s a chance to think about what I’d like to achieve in 2022. Which, given the ongoing covid crisis and other issues, isn’t easy.

Personal life

I don’t tend to mention my personal life much but 2022 will be affected by it, probably to a major degree. Long story short, I plan to move out in April – and while the exact timing is still in flux, I know that getting everything running smoothly will take a lot of my time; time that will affect my hobbies, which is what I mention 90+% of my time on this blog.

Since that alone is a major step up, I have no other goal for my personal life than to get this done. Though maybe a regular exercise would help me…

Books

I’ve kept my reading goal at 20 books, as during the last year. Even with the move, I think it should be well-achievable. I still plan to stick mostly to less-known self-published books, so my money goes to people who will actually appreciate it rather than making the already rich even richer. And, finally, while I focus on fantasy, I’ll try to put a bit of Sci-Fi into the mix as well.

Hiking

I was very reluctant to make hiking goals at the beginning of 2021. Unstable weather, impending lockdowns… and still getting used to the fact that being a full-time employee and not just a student anymore meant much less wiggling room for planning hikes. The result? despite a two-month lockdown, it was my third best year with just a bit over 900km when I expected around 700 at best, especially as the spring was a tough start due to both the lockdown and me still dealing with the after-effects of covid.

That said, I’m staying with my 2021 approach, looking at ~700km which – unless the weather gets extremely terrible – seems to be doable.

Writing

On the writing front, my focus will be on drafting book two. I hope to finish at least two drafts, though what I call a full “draft” is often very flexible. The ideal case would be to have book two ready for the final polishing by the end of 2022 and preferably some early work done on book three, which had seen little attention in 2021.

That said, there are some other things that I’d like to do, some of the smaller magnitude.

The first is to make some conclusions about deleted and dropped scenes, especially from book one. I know I’d like to share them in some way, but I haven’t yet decided how exactly, which to choose, and how much to share about discarded elements from the concept stage. Then, there are bonus scenes I haven’t used in the book that are a part of the story – they show more about the characters – but I haven’t found a place to use them.

I also had an idea to spruce up the look of chapter headers, something I’ll deal with probably during the final stage of book two and would then update book one along with it. This means this may end up being an early 2023 task rather than 2022.

Another piece in the pile of small things is that I’d like to give sketching a try and see if I can create some – at least simplified – images of how I see my characters. I think this would be a good way to use my spare time if I’m stuck with writing while still contributing to the project as a whole.

Finally, I decided to add another short story to my pile of ideas – this one would describe how Kraasian and Ellisia first met. My plan would be to have a rough concept prepared so I can give it a go later (probably not this year), especially some idea about the other characters involved and how many new characters it may need. I can’t even guess the length at this point.

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So, that’s my very rough set of goals for 2022. Time will tell how things go. Hopefully, in a year’s time, I’ll be here to say most of those goals were met.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your own goals. Feel free to share them.