Hugh J. O'Donnell

Happy New Year, everybody!  2015 is over and it is time to look ahead to the new year.  But first, let me consider and retire the Page of Awesome for 2015.  The Page of Awesome is the little tally in my notebook where I set my goals for the year and keep track of how I do.  And this year, my eyes were bigger than my productivity.
I put up a little tracker at the side of this blog, and as you can tell, I didn’t make most of my goals.  I wanted to publish over 400 blog posts, and I fell well short of that.  Partially that is because last year at this time I was working on “The City,” and I expected to release more daily drabble serials.  But after I completed the first one, I stalled out on two more.  In 2016, I might finish and release more of them, but if I do, I don’t know if a daily blog post is the best format.  And if it is, I won’t start until the work is finished.
I did better on podcast fiction, and even cleared my goal of 50!  I kind of slacked off on them in the later half of the year, though.  In 2016, I’ll be trying to collect all of my podcasts in one place for convenience.  The Way of the Buffalo, Freelance Hunters, and Chrononaut Cinema Review podcasts are all hosted in different feeds, and while I plan on keeping all of those going, I’m a bit jealous of my friends with Uber-feeds, and I’d like to have something here on this site.  That should be launching this week.
I didn’t write as much as I wanted to this year.  I particularly didn’t edit as much as I needed to.  As a result, I didn’t make either goal for short story submissions or self-produced ebooks.  I still have some things to get out the door, but if 2015 taught me anything, it is to not write checks my ass can’t cash.  I think it is better to be a mysterious author and leave you all in suspense rather than promise more than I can deliver.
Which is why I am NOT publicly making any goals this year.  The Page of Awesome will continue, and I’ll be making brand new and exclusive (for at least a little while) content for my patrons over at patreon.com/hughjodonnell, but I’ve been thinking a lot about goal-setting as a metric of success, and I’m not sure it’s good for me at this stage.  I’m obviously not great at setting goals, and failing to reach them made me feel bad, even though I didn’t do too badly.  I still had a lot of blog posts and story submissions this year.  I want to stay positive in 2016, and thus, I’m only announcing my results, not goals.
In the meantime, there will be a lot of cool stuff happening around here in 2016, and I hope you stick around.

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