Review Your Creativity for the Year and Propel Yourself and Your Projects into the Next

It’s mid-December, late in the year, a fine time to look back at what’s been accomplished. Then, I’ll turn my attention to the coming year and make plans.

You might consider doing this, as well.

If you do it correctly, you can generate creative energy to propel you into the start of the new year.

I’m going to give you a crash course in how I do it, and I hope it’ll inspire you to plan some projects for next year.

Basically, my annual review and plan for 2025 will be conducted in public via this email.

I set some lofty goals for this year. Here are a few:

• Find an agent or publisher for my novel Ashley Undone (nope)
• Complete my novel Currently Unnamed (nope)
• Find an agent or publisher for Currently Unnamed (nope)
• Launch the Renewable Creativity website, newsletter, and courses (yep)
• Launch a side-hustle business (yep)

I didn’t hit my first three, but I put in the work. I then pivoted and prepared to self-publish Ashley Undone (check it out here if you’d like to be an advance reviewer)

I revised the Currently Unnamed novel and sent it out for feedback; that was a satisfying bit of work.

You’re reading the Renewable Creativity newsletter, and you can check out my side hustle here. I haven’t done any promotion, but I’m satisfied with the work I completed — and will continue improving offer and the website.

Some bonus achievements were to get a few humor pieces published, and consistently send out my writing newsletter. Oh, and I took five classes on writing to improve my craft.

Considering that I have a full-time job and had cancer this summer, that’s a goodly amount of stuff to get done.

The work I did last year was brought into focus by the cancer. I enjoyed all of the work, but I really want to work more on novels in the coming year.

I have this list of stories I’ve been wanting to tell for a while. I’m going to put more focus into those stories, and get as many out in the world as possible.

To that end, this newsletter, which is meant to be weekly, will likely become semi-weekly. (I don’t think you’ll mind much, but let me know if you have thoughts.)

I’m going to self-publish the two novels currently in flight, write two more, and self-publish at least one of those.

I’m going to write a few short stories, as well.

I also plan on playing ukulele more, learning guitar, and exercising more. These items are important to complement my creativity and ensure I have the energy to do all this fun stuff.

There are a few ways to document your annual plans which I won’t get into here. (Reach out if you’re interested and I’ll write them down for you.)

The exercise completed above may be all you need. I’ve been doing this for so long, and have used a variety of specific planning tools, that I’ve gotten quite good at keeping up with tasks so that I don’t need much more than a high-level list.

You may need to break it down as follows:

• Annual goals
• Quarterly milestones to track progress
• Weekly task management to achieve the milestones
• Daily intentions and progress review

In fact, I covered a lot of this a few weeks back in a Renewable Creativity newsletter called The Rhythms of Life…

Take a look and let me know if you have any questions.