Between New Year's and my birthday, this time of year I frequently stop to reassess my life and my goals. Goals are nothing more than daydreams unless one actively works towards achieving them. This is a good time for me to reflect on how well my past activities have worked towards achieving my goals and what I need to do differently.

First off, I realize that I lost better than a year after Tod's death. That is normal. Grief will not wait. Goals will. Now it is time to get back to work. I still have two major goals to achieve. One is to publish a book and the other is to achieve some success at selling my art.

I am not greedy. I don't need to sell canvasses for thousands. I am not a Monet or Degas. I often say God gave me just enough talent to tease me. While it is intended as humor it is also very true. Good artists are a dime a dozen. All one has to do is peruse the sites where artists throng to sell their work to realize that. Just making enough in sales to supplement my income is all of the success I need. My strategies in this arena are not working. Firstly, I am a terrible business person when it comes to my art, and secondly, my goals to this end are not well defined, making this more of a daydream. While I direct a lot of energy into painting, I direct very little towards selling. Most of my sales are lucky accidents.

Writing: I have invested very little energy here in years. I am scanning in a manuscript that I completed in 1993! Wow! Seventeen years later and I am still dickering with this! Think maybe I dropped the ball here? I have determined to sell this manuscript this year. I have no interest in self-publishing and I truly believe this one is good enough to get published by a traditional publisher.

One thing I need in order to accomplish both goals is an action plan with realistic intermediate targets. Got that started and I need to finish that too. I only put it aside long enough to figure out my strategies and do some research on things that work and things that don't. Let us see where I am this time next year...