Goals for 2023

I know, it's a bit presumptuous to set writing goals when I haven't been doing much writing for the past couple of years, but I need something to get my creative juices flowing at pulp speed. It's good to be sitting at the keyboard again and putting words to paper, but goals are important. So, let's see what we can do.

First, I'm going to set a reasonable goal of one published book per month in 2023. That's twelve books, whether they be novels or short story collections (more likely the former). Genre doesn't really matter, although I expect there will be a fairly even mix of fantasy and mystery. Maybe four of each. I would like to get another Meterra book done, as well as (of course) more Cameron Vail. I don't know about sci-fi; it's not my go-to genre. But we'll see.

I also want to keep my blog more consistent; daily writing is important, and forcing myself to post daily will help keep me on track for the rest of my writing.

If I'm going to write a book a month, I'm going to need to be consistently writing a minimum of a thousand words per day. Two thousand would be better, but one thousand has to be the floor. Thirty thousand words is a decent book; my mysteries have clocked in at roughly those numbers so far. But forty-five thousand or so should be a reasonable expectation.

So far, these goals seem reasonable and achievable, which is important. But there are other things going on in life besides writing. I do, after all, live on a farm. So, I'm going to set some farming goals as well.

The most important goal is to increase our income from the farm so I can move to a full-time at-home situation instead of driving to town every day to work. That isn't going to happen this year, but it's time to show some significant improvement in the farm income.

Our income from the farm this year came from three main sources: eggs, chicken, and pork. We didn't sell any vegetables from the garden; we just didn't grow enough. But next year, the gardens will be bigger, and I think I learned a lot in 2021 and 2022. So, we might see some actual income from the gardens in 2023.

As for the meat, we're planning to sell lots of meat chickens and raise three pigs instead of just two. For the chickens, the Cornish Cross breed is a quick-growing breed; eight to ten weeks from hatching to butchering. If we can grow a bunch of them (fifty or so) in the spring and sell them, we can do the same in the summer and fall as well. Two or even three sets of meat birds will be an excellent source of income. We're also looking at learning how to butcher them ourselves, which will save a lot of money; it costs quite a bit to butcher a chicken.

We also have laying hens, although we're going to be streamlining the flock to focus on one particular breed of chicken. We'll have to look over our egg production to see if selling them as a consistent product is a viable option. We had some issues with eggs this year; we need to make sure we do better for 2023.

As for pork, we did okay with raising the pigs this year, considering we had no clue what we were doing and we started late in the year. Our pigs weighed over 280 pounds each after slaughter, and we got a LOT of meat from them. Forty pounds of bacon alone. We actually sold enough pork that we made a profit and still had plenty of meat left over (including the bacon). So, we're going to look at picking up three bacon seeds this spring and raising them for the meat. We had enough takers for our pork packages this year that I have no doubt we'll do even better next year.

Finally, the big question: Should we get a couple of cows? I'm inclined to say 'no' right now, although I won't rule it out for later in the year. The main reason is because we're still new at this, and we don't have anywhere to put the cows for now. Which is ironic, since this used to be a dairy farm. But we've repurposed the barns, so bringing cows in would be a major undertaking.

Now, I can see the pros to raising a couple of cows. First, milk. Dairy products are getting insanely expensive here on the Island. Having a milking cow would mean we'd have a steady supply of milk, cream and butter that didn't cost us anything beyond the feed. But it would require me to get up every damn morning and milk the cow. The second cow would be a beef steer; raising a beef cow would mean we would be set for the year with whatever meat we wanted. But it's not going to be cheap.

So, it's something to think about for the upcoming year. In the meantime, though, writing has to happen. I'm going to get to that now.