Hey everyone,
It’s been a good week in the Khullar Relph household. First, I received the excellent news that after 9 years, 4 months, and 24 days in the UK, I have been granted permanent residency.
Most of you won’t know this but, until now, my status in the UK as the spouse of a British national was that I could be deported and separated from my child based on a single phone call. Not that my husband would ever make that phone call, but the law shows you your place and value in society. Yesterday, I was finally given the right to live in this country, regardless of my marital status or income.
Second, I won NaNoWriMo. By “won,” I mean I wrote 50,000 words of the first draft of a novel this month. My novel’s only halfway done, though, so I’ll be continuing on in December and not stopping to take stock until it’s finished.
NaNo this year led to some interesting revelations for me, the biggest of which is that I don’t need hours upon hours of free time to make progress on personal projects. I track my time, so I know it took me approximately 40 hours to write these 50,000 words. I wrote for an hour every night (though I scheduled two because, you know, anxiety) and did more when I could over weekends. This was in addition to the 25,000 words of writing I did for freelance content clients. It felt fairly effortless toward the end, so I’ve decided to just stick to this schedule going forward.
The other thing NaNo reminded me of is that I love challenges and respond really well to them. Habit formation is difficult for me, but put a challenge at the end of it and the habit forms naturally. I’m surprised I’ve never used this knowledge in my goal setting before, but I’m planning to now.
In 2024, I’m setting challenges instead of annual goals, the first of which is to write a million words over the year. That’s 2,750 words a day, and given that I averaged 2,000 words a day in October and 2,600 in November, it’s not a difficult goal. The challenge, for me, is not in writing that many words, but staying consistent long term and not quitting out of boredom (or poor mental health). The trick is in setting goals I have full control over. I can control how much I pitch, but not how many assignments I bring in. Setting a pitching goal is, therefore, an excellent idea; an assignment goal not so much. It’s why, in recent years, I’ve moved away from income goals and more toward production goals.
The other goal I’m excited about is for Wordling Plus. In 2024, I’m committing to adding 365 new pieces of content to the membership (this includes trainings, workshops, course lessons, samples, templates, etc). As of this writing, there are already 473 individual pieces of content in the membership (check it out here!) Over the next year, I’ll be finding areas in which I’m not so strong and inviting professionals to share their expertise with our members. I want Wordling PLUS to become a one-stop shop for writing and business advice and not be limited by my knowledge and skill set (or lack thereof).
The third piece is growing the number of subscribers of this newsletter. No idea how to frame that as a challenge yet, but it’s something I want to focus on in the coming year.
As you can probably tell, this is the most excited I’ve been about goals in a while. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that signing up for a novel writing challenge on a whim could have led to all that! It has proven to me, once again, that sometimes it’s important to just follow a feeling and see where it takes you. You never know where it might lead.
Cheers,
Natasha