Leah - September...? Kicked Its Butt ^_^

Gooooooooooood grief! It's been a bit of a whirlwind month with more highs and lows than the ripply back of a moody camel.

Okay... moodier than this one...

Looking back at my goal list at the start of the month I think I've been both successful and unsuccessful. If that's possible. I think it is.

I have achieved a lot this month. Let there be no mistake about that. Despite that, I have not completed everything on the list.

But it doesn't matter!

This month I have:

• Certainly earned monies fitting with my £50 per month goal.
• Completed a short story draft (the next in the Meeting Each Other Series) and am about a fortnight away from sending it to my editor
• Readied myself to publish 'Vicki & Lara' through self publishing means
• Not gone crazy

That last one is key as I've been quite ill for the past fortnight. And so have my boys. *whimper* I've also done a bunch of small things that all add towards the bigger goals. Things like paying for editors, finding paying work, buying ISBNs, organising potential taxes for here and the US, reading my magazines, maintaining my blog, running competitions (woo!), LARPing and so on and so on. Like I said... busy.

So... coming up we have October and these are the things I would like to do by 31 October:

• Hit 'GO' on Vicki & Lara
• Be ready to tackle NaNoWriMo 2013
• Have secured another £100 of earnings
• Decide what I'm really going to do about Silk Over Razor Blades (fiddle? rewrite? query?) and put it aside or get to work

Now these goals are less SMART that the last ones I wrote, but I've been setting myself weekly targets on my own blog so that is the SMART aspect. I've broken the long term goals down into short ones, then the short ones into even shorter. This way I'm actually getting things done. It's a nice feeling.

An important part of goal setting is also setting appropriate rewards. I've not thought about that perhaps as much as I should, just because I tend to reward/treat/bribe myself whenever I feel like I'm going to fall to bits if I don't get a nice treat. If I don't, things like this happens:

I did cry by the way. Just a little bit. The single tear, y'know? Very Hollywood.

This month, however, I have an idea for an actual reward. Assuming I can get to the end of the list above, I'm going to let myself have a spa/pampering day. Something a friend of mine has been trying to convince me to have for some time... she thinks I need it. Ha, go figure. ;-)
But I'm actually going to do it. ^_^

How are you guys getting on? Hope you've got some good things to tell me!