Happy New Year!

Are you busy making New Years Resolutions? Imagining a bright shiny new year where you will accomplish things, improve things, maintain things? I am. But then again, I’m a goals girl. A resolution maker. To be honest, I live for this stuff.

Every year I type out our family’s resolutions and post them on our peg board. (My husband participates because he loves me.) It’s always fun at the end of the year to pull that list down and see how things went.

One of the reasons that I do this every year is that I know the power of goal making. Case in point right here, this quote.

It’s the reason I finally got my butt in gear about getting a book published. I decided that if I was going to get one published, I wanted to get it done before I turned 30/had kids. I added GET A BOOK PUBLISHED onto my New Years Resolutions list back on New Years 2009. And because my dream suddenly had a deadline, I started taking tangible steps towards making it a reality.

But, I will admit, that GET A BOOK PUBLISHED, got put on my resolutions list for MANY years, before I had the satisfaction of crossing it off my list in 2014. Some resolutions just take longer than a year, but remember….

So this year, I thought I’d post my resolutions, at least my book related ones, here to keep me honest.

Laura Martin’s Author Resolutions

• Write a NEW book (Something fresh…brand new…probably without dinosaurs!)
• Post to the Blog more regularly (I’m erratic at best…down right sketchy at worst about posting to this thing.)
• Branch outside of Indiana with book promotion efforts (I’ve visited primarily Indiana schools and participated in Indiana events, but this year it’s time to visit some new places! Anyone have any suggestions where to start?)
• Get a New Book Deal (With Edge of Extinction-Code Name Flood coming out in May 2017, the Edge of Extinction series is wrapped up…for now at least. But my goal is to get another book in the publishing pipeline this year. Cross your fingers, say a prayer, and wish me luck.)
• Keep my office organized (Ha. This may be the most difficult. I am messy, and unorganized, and I bought a desk with NO STORAGE. It is essentially a glorified table. It looks nice, but where is a girl supposed to store her dinosaurs?!)
• Dedicate a ½ hour every day to JUST writing…not book promotion, not blogging, not returning emails, just back to my roots writing. (This is one I’m looking forward to the most. My ‘writing time’ these days is usually more –‘book maintenance’ time. I need to start turning off my phone, disconnecting the internet, and opening up the imagination floodgates to see what happens.)
• -Less Social Media/Internet distractions. I think social media is wonderful, but I also think that I pick up my phone to check the time and put it down a half hour later not sure where that time just went… It needs to stop.)

So there is my list. Sent out into the great wide web, and I think it will help keep me honest. I’ll post back at the end of 2017 to let you all know how I did.

On a more serious note, I wanted to take a quick moment to THANK all of you. This year was a big year for me. It was the year my very first book landed on bookshelves, and I am beyond thankful for every single person who read it.

A story is not a story until it finds a reader, and I am not lying when I say that I have the very best readers.

You guys wrote reviews on Amazon and Good Reads, you showed up at book signings, you invited me to your schools, you instagramed, facebooked, and requested that your library buy my book. I just wanted to stay a huge thank you for all of that.

It was noticed.
It was appreciated.
And it means more to me than you will ever know.

As a writer, you pour so much of yourself into your book. I don’t want to be dramatic and say it’s like having another child, but it’s close. The words are chipped bit by bit from that something inside of you that makes you, you, and then you send those fragile little words out into the great big world and hope for the best. Thank you for being kind to my words. For diving whole-heartedly into the world of dinosaurs with Sky and her friends.

Thank you.

Really.

I hope all of you have a wonderful 2017 where all your resolutions and goals are met, and where you live big and dream bigger.

Happy New Years everyone!