What I wanted to achieve.

I made very vague long term goals when I was younger. My drive through the last two years of high school was to get to the one university I knew was offering the writing degree I received. I was unwilling to consider other options, only putting them down because our tertiary entrance exams required us to nominate what would be called safety schools in the US. The score required to get into my top choice wasn't hard to obtain with a decent amount of effort. But I was disappointed having to do more homework and exams not six months out of my entrance exams. And the course didn't really propel my drive to write, it pretty much crushed it.

But my long term goal was to have a part time job so I could write on the side. I joked I'd write trashy romance novels from a cardboard box on the street because I knew already I wasn't going to end up a "famous" well-paid author. I pictured myself gaining some popularity and people wanted to interview me, and I'd dispense my creative drives etc. All very self-indulgent fantasies for a seventeen year old.

In the end, I did reach my goal. I am working part time, I've been published by two means rather than the one I originally set out to achieve, and I have all the time I need to write. So that's it, right?

Nope. Not entirely. I'm not done, I'm still writing to get better at what I do. I'm waiting to see if my next novel will be picked up, and I did once state to myself I'd only go through this process once, but I'm not totally happy with the first result and it's pushed me to do better. But I've achieved my main goal.

My biggest writing goal was to give a reader a moment similar to one I had when I was reading Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted. It's a set of short stories linked by an over-arcing plot that brings all the storytellers into one rather horrific and hilarious narrative. Rather than save the worst until last, the first story is easily the most graphic. Graphic enough to make me turn away from the words I was reading as if the image itself were on the page. There was also an incident at a reading where someone passed out from the mental image - it became the stuff of legend among his avid fans. My goal was to have a moment in a book that visceral the reader was compelled to react as strongly. But I pull too many punches to really get that far. So far, I've written stories that people couldn't put down - my best compliment to date. We may have smaller goals within our bigger ones. I haven't stopped working towards anything. But I have gotten as far as I originally wanted.