Setting New Year Goals: Writing, Exercise, and More

Wow, this place is dusty. It looks like I stopped blogging just over 2 years ago. Crazy! It sort of looks like I haven’t been writing in an even longer time, but the truth is, I’ve been focusing my attention on other pen names.

Even this year, I’m not starting right off with my personal name (this one, GS Wright), I’m going to be writing under two of my other pen names for the 1st quarter of this year. I can talk about pen names later, if anyone is interested.

But wait! I hear you say, this blog is titled 2026 goals! And you’re right! It IS titled 2026 goals. So I guess let’s get to it!

Writing Goal

First off, I make word count goals every year, and I never really hit the 1 million words that I shoot for. I tend to fall around 200k words for the year, sometimes up to 400k. This year, I am keeping the 1 million words for the 2026 goal, but I’m taking a different approach.

To hit my word count, I’m changing things up and using dictation; basically talking my stories instead of typing them. The difference that this makes is significant. Typing, my output is around 1600 wph. I started dictating at the 1st part of the year, and my current average is 3700 wph, with my best hour’s output at 4500 wph. I’m hoping that once I get acclimated to the process, my average will creep closer to 5k words an hour.

There’s been so much going on for the start of this year, I’ve only been writing for an hour a day (yes, I’m still calling it writing… calling it talking sounds dumb), and my output still is so much higher. Side note: I only count words going to publishable projects, not emails or blog stuff.

I am not committing to blogging every day, because that’s never worked well for me. But I think I’ll try to update my writer’s life every Monday (or Tuesday) and Friday (or weekend). I actually considered doing a YT vlog, but yeah, no. But maybe Substack might be in my future. We’ll see.

Exercise

Yeah, because this one is a given for New Year’s goals. I need to be exercising more often.

TTRPG

I’ve been working on a Tabletop Role-playing Game forever. I’d like to have the alpha edition of the game as something playable within a month. This is something that I’ll be going public with as soon as I feel that it is launch-ready. This will mainly live on Substack. More on this later!

Music

I’ve been ignoring making music lately. I intend to work that back into my life. Not for any purpose other than that I enjoy it. When am I doing this? I dunno. I’ll start soon. Probably. It’s low on the goals list.

So, yeah! There’s all of that, plus a few other things outside the scope of this blog, but I might write about later. We’ll see where I am by this weekend!