GENREALITY

I love talking about goals. Like Ken, I have a birthday in January, and thus it seems like an even more important time for me to embrace new beginnings. (Also, since my birthday is later in the week, I have the opportunity to “ease into” my resolutions for a few weeks.)

In the past, I’ve taken Carrie’s approach that I should only make goals about the things I can control — i.e., work I do, not contracts I get. But at the same time (and as woo-woo as it sounds) there is something to be said for putting your goals out in the universe. Or, on a more practical level, of figuring out what you really want, because then, even subconsciously, you start taking the necessary steps toward getting there.

Last year, while I was out on maternity leave and evaluating what — while exhausted and rocking my baby at 3 a.m., seemed a very bleak future — I took the advice of a friend and made a “dream list”. I could not control what was happening to me in 2011. The impact that my complicated pregnancy and the chaos of adding a newborn into my life had already happened: I would have no new novels out in 2011. A kerfuffle with one of my anthologies pushed the release dates back to 2012. I couldn’t control that either. But if 2011 was to be a building year for me, what was I building toward?

They were all things I had no control over, like having a movie made of my books or hitting a bestseller list. Imagine my shock, then, when one of said dreams came true. Next month, an anthology will be released with my name on the cover:

Brave New Love

I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this cover. For the first time, I wasn’t one of the “and many more.” There was my name, right next to my critique partner, Carrie Ryan’s, and one of my childhood favorite SF writers, William Sleator (who, sadly, passed away last year).

(By the way, this anthology also has Carrie Vaughn in it, and I can only imagine they didn’t put her name on the cover because of a plurality of Carries.)

So now I’m a little swayed by the idea of setting goals even over things we can’t control. So this year, when I did my usual “goal” list on my blog, I included a few items that I, personally, have no control over. Like getting invited to another anthology. As it turns out, I love writing short stories. (I did it sort of backwards from most SFF writers I know, who usually published lots of short stories before they came out with a novel.) I have four short stories releasing in anthologies this year.

But I don’t really have any control over getting asked. I can let friends know that I’m interested in writing more (and indeed, that’s how I got invited to one of my anthologies this year, as one of my previous antho editors passed my name along to a colleague who was putting together another one).

And guess what? It’s already happened. I got invited to an anthology last week. I still have to figure out if it’ll work for my schedule, but meanwhie, yay, universe.

So now I have a sort of hybrid approach. If you read my 2012 goal list, you’ll see it concentrates mainly on things I can control: output, building a home life/work balance, etc. But it’s always nice to think about those pie-in-the-sky dreams, too. To have them in mind, like a distant island you’re sailing toward, just over the horizon and out of sight.

What about you? Any crazy dreams for this year? You don’t have to tell me what they are. But it’s wonderful to have them, even kept secret in your heart.

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