March Writing Goals

I need goals to make progress (whether I meet the goal or not), and I like reading other writers' goals, so this is one of those posts. My big goal, at the moment, is to finish my current draft by the end of April.

In January, my goals were to critique a manuscript for a friend and to add 12,000 more words to my first draft. I finished the critique but fell short at 11,000 words. In February, I just wanted to add another 12,000 words. I wrote . . .

. 

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. . .  wait for it . . .

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 . . .  11,000 words. 

This month, I'd like to write down at least one of the picture book ideas that came to me last month and make up my deficit by adding 15,000 words. But if I only write 11,000 words, I'll probably still finish up this rough draft by the end of April. I may finish it this month. It feels like I'm so close to the end, but there are still a few major events to write, and I think I'll scrap most of my beginning. 

That got me thinking: when I scrap my beginning and start writing through the story again, it would really be my second draft. The story will have a beginning, a middle, and an end by that point, even if I wouldn't hand it to someone else.

And I realized I have a NaNoWriMo novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end from November of 2009 that I haven't even read through. I hadn't been thinking of it as a finished draft because the word count was under 30,000. I left holes in it where I wanted to look things up (NaNoWriMo isn't a great time to research). But I also left holes in the first novel* that I wrote. Hmmm. I think I'm going to call it a finished first draft and make sure I read through it (revise and fill holes) at some point this year.  

So, when I finish my current draft, I'll have three rather longish stories to revise. *scratches head* At least I don't get writer's block, right?

*I've gone through five drafts on Star Swans (my first), but it's still not ready to query.