Reading and Writing - 2009 goals

For the first time in my just over 62 years, I am going to set goals for the coming year - goals in two specific areas reading and writing. I hope that doing this will enable me to hold myself accountable in my writing and be better able to reflect on what I read over the next twelve months.

In reading my goal is simply to keep a record of every book that I read in 2009. Since I was retired for all of 2008 I probably read more books than in the previous five years combined. But I kept no records of what I read and trying to recreate the list at this point would be hopeless especially given the number of library books that I read. My best guess is that I read about 50 books. My goal for 2009 is to read as much as possible, but not to get caught up in some kind of numbers game. Rather I want to be able to have a full list of what I have read and use that as a basis for choosing the books that I enjoyed the most - much like Elaine at Random Jottings and Simon at "Stuck in a Book" have done on their blogs.

I will also admit to some level of curiosity as to the number I will read. Certainly there is no way I will be in Elaine's over 200 level, but it would just be nice to have a sense of the number of books read. Of course, the type of books has a lot to do with that and the amount of history that I read will limit the number as will my preference for very long novels. In any event, it will be an interesting exercise and I look forward to it.

In terms of writing I have some very clear goals in mind. First Paul and I have to finish the final work on "The Major League Pennant Races of 1916," which should/better be done in the first week of January. Next I want to finish my part of the pioneer project by no later than March 1st. I am fairly far along on that and should be able to meet that self imposed deadline - the real deadline is May 1st. After that is done, I want to finish the editing of the William Lloyd letters so that a manuscript can be sent off to potential publishers. This is a little aggressive, but I would like to have that done by September 1st or about the beginning of the 2009 Rutgers football season.

The aggressive target date for the Lloyd letters is that I have been working too much on my writing without any real break. The manuscript of the 1916 book was sent in February of 2008 and I was almost immediately working on the pioneer project and the Lloyd letters (actually I had been working on the Lloyd letters all along). So once I finish the Lloyd letters project I want to take an extended break both to carefully choose my next book project and to get my English family history research organized in anticipation of a 2010 trip to England.

As noted at the beginning this is the first time, I have done anything like this so it will be interesting to see how it all works out.