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Chuck Palahniuk’s excellent essays on writing are back, after an all too long hiatus. In his January essay, he closes by saying: “And welcome to 2008, if you do nothing else in January — please — make a list of the goals you’ll accomplish in the next 12 months. Then, share those goals with as many people as possible. Please, expect more from yourself than you think will be possible. Use this year to become someone bigger, smarter, happier than you ever imagined.” Which I intend to.

It’s been almost three whole months since my last update, and to be frank, I think some of the reason behind this is that I’m reluctant to expect too much from myself. So, I figure, what better way to deal with that fear than to replace it with an even greater fear? To replace my fear of demanding more from myself and not accomplishing my goals, with the fear of public humiliation?

The first step, then, is to make public my goals for this year. If I’ve failed to accomplish a single one of them by the end of December, do feel free to rub it in my face. I actually encourage you to do so.

So, without further ado, commence utter shame and humiliation:

1: Finish a short-story I have only gotten round to writing a few opening paragraphs on, never mind writing down a whole plot outline. The story deals thematically with euthanasia, a theme that I think I’ve been putting off to deal with due to my mother’s boyfriend being terminally ill with cancer, and then eventually passed away last fall. I’ve been, perhaps, overly conscious about the fact that it will be emotionally exhausting to work on that particular subject. So, it’s about time I exorcized some demons.

2: Finish a short-story that is on paper only a paragraph long, but has been fully outlined in my head for over half a year. A small community of survivalists have been living inside a complex of underground nuclear fallout shelters for years. Not having proper protection against radiation, none have ventured outside, so as far as they know they’re what’s left of life on earth. At the outset of this story, people are getting murdered for no apparent reason, and someone is vandalizing all the equipment that makes for the underground life support. So it’s a choice between staying underground and fight an unknown enemy, risking extinction in the process, or fleeing outside and more than likely get everyone killed by radiation.

Now, this story is actually one I’ve been really looking forward to work on, so why have I been putting it off? Again, I think it’s sufficient to point to my fear of failure, of not accomplishing anything. Then flip off that fear and say: “Fuck you, I am going to do something worthwhile with my life!”

3: Finalize the first draft of a novella that’s been in fictional purgatory for over a year. Again, most of the plot is already clear to me, but I think I might have written myself into some kind of dead-end. At least it seems that way. Every time I take a look at what I’ve read, that last sentence just. Stops. In theme with the actual themes of the story, it’s time I took a giant leap of faith, and followed the somewhat anarchic theory that in order to build anew, one must first make rubble. Rubble in this sense, meaning to not be afraid to delete some paragraphs in order to unblock that particular dead-end.

4: Finalize a first draft of a novel-length text I started working on last month. The inspiration came from reading about the murder of Sylvia Likens back in 1965. What intrigued me was how so many children did nothing to help the poor girl; some even participated in torturing her. All with the encouragement and blessing of the mother in the house Sylvia Likens and her younger sister lived. Why didn’t anyone tell the authorities, their parents, or simply be the voice of reason and tell the other children that what they did was wrong?

So, I want to explore this further. One of the main characters in this story is a man who in his childhood participated in torturing and killing a young girl, and through him maybe I can get some answers. Or at least get some kind of understanding of the brutality of it all.

Being my most recent project, the inspiration for this story is still very much alive. So putting this public, I hope that this serves as a motivation to keep working. Working to finish this story and the three I’ve mentioned before.

5: Make an effort to get something published. Okay, I know that actually getting fiction published is not entirely in my hands. I am aware that — unless I finance it myself, which I can’t afford — book publishers and magazines have the final say in what they choose to put money into. But what I can do is to work towards making my stories as well-written as I can. To find themes that not only are interesting to me, but other people will find interesting to read. And last, to actually mail some manuscripts. Worst case scenario, I’ll share the faith of so many others, getting a rejection letter. And again, I think it’s that fear of failure that’s been keeping me back. But (at least at the time of writing this) I’m determined to not let that stop me. To use a rejection letter as a motivation to be a better writer. To refine the themes, to make for more interesting reading, to try and accomplish my goals.

So, there it is. Five goals for this year. Five very specific and clear goals. And looking back on them, I see that they are all very much possible to achieve. They are not affected by some external influence, and so very much in my own hands. The only thing that will hinder me from achieving those five goals is me. And only me. This isn’t reaching for the stars. This is reaching for an apple that, if I only make the effort to stretch to my full length, is well within my reach.

So here’s to a productive year!

What are your goals?

(Picture obviously extremely unrelated. But any excuse to put up pictures of cute kittens is good enough for me.)