It could be Seasonal Affective Disorder, a natural inclination or the way the whole of December has become a placeholder for the commercial festival that is Christmas, but this last week before the holiday is bringing me down. It’s so hard to plan anything beyond the week and a bit of winter festival, which can be annoying.

But motivation is at hand in the form of another Problogger competition courtesy of Darren Rowse. He wants an end of year list, looking forward or back. I’ll do a review of the year some other time, let’s look to the future now, it’s only just begun.

To do in 2007-

Average 1000 words a day. That should mean write every day, but more likely will be achieved in bursts of creativity. The plan is to get Post & Publish rewritten in the style of Boyfriend Season and sent to publishers and agents. Shorter stuff, like So Much To Answer For and my truncated NaNoWriMo story, will get bundled into PDFs and sold through the site.

One product a month. At least one, this shouldn’t be an average. The best moneyspinners this year have been the Small Scale Customs stuff and the Poser backgrounds. I need to get my finger out and make, and promote, more of them.

Talk to more people. Every so often I’ll have a conversation with someone I know that goes something like-

Me: ‘I’m really quite shy.’

Them: ‘No you’re not.’

Me: ‘Yes I am.’

Them: ‘No you’re not.’ etc.

I really am crap at talking to strangers, and I’ll go and hide in the corner at parties (at least until I’ve had too much to drink, which is another matter). So I really need to learn some conversational tricks to get past that initial reticence. The good thing about talking to more people is that I’ll get to hear more tales, always good for inspiration.

Move more, eat less. It might happen.

Be happy with how I make a living. I’ve never had a truly satisfying job. Such things may not exist. But I can at least try to find one that isn’t so demoralising. Ideally I’d like to be making money from writing and my websites. I’ve said before that I’d accept living on less if it meant I was independent of an employer, and the quest to do so goes on.

Sent from my phone. To be edited and added to later.

(Let It Snow, Dean Martin [and many others over the years])

Update Now with added linkage. If you can think of anything I need to do next year, please add it to the comments.