December IWSG & Looking into the Future

Happy IWSG day! The Insecure Writer's Support Group is the brainchild of host Alex J. Cavanaugh and meets the first Wednesday of every month. To join the group, view the list of current members, and learn about Alex's co-hosts for the month, visit the IWSG page here. 

For the last several months the IWSG team has been providing us with a monthly question to answer as part of our post if we choose. This month's question is:

 "In terms of your writing career, where do you see yourself five years from now, and what’s your plan to get there?"

This question resonated with me because it's something I've been thinking about quite a bit over the past year. And as 2016 ends, I've decided to change my focus and make some big changes in my writing goals and activities in 2017. 

As anyone who visits this blog regularly knows, I love animals and advocate for animal causes whenever I can. When I first started blogging six years ago, my plan was to blog about this interest and develop a freelance writing career around it. It's safe to say I got sidetracked, but in a great way because of my novels and stories. 

It's been a thrill and a dream to see my stories out in the world and I've loved every second of it. But for now I've decided to focus the majority of my writing time on writing non-fiction pieces about animals and advocacy. I also plan to continue writing children's books that allow me to showcase animal rescues as I did with Baby Moo's Great Escape. 

Within the next few weeks I'm going to set up a blog on Wordpress called All In For Animals. It's going to be about animal care, wildlife, environmental issues, and, of course, rescues and sanctuaries. I also plan to do book reviews, share cute animal pics or videos, and post other fun things as they arise. I'm taking a course right now on professional blogging and hope to apply what I'm learning to this new venture. 

I'm very excited about these plans and while I know the new site will be hard work, I don't think it will feel too much like it since I'll be doing something I'm passionate about. I'm not shutting this blog down though, and still plan to participate in this group and the weekly Celebrate hop. I'll also always be open to helping spread the word about new book releases from blogger friends. 

Since I skipped last month's IWSG due to NaNoWriMo I wanted to add a quick note to this about my NaNo experience. I was a total NaNo dropout! But I don't regret signing up, because doing so proved to me that the story I wanted to write was better suited to a short story or novella than to a novel. Trying to turn it into a novel made that crystal clear! 

Even though it didn't turn out the way I wanted, I'm still glad I signed up and gave it a try. I now have an idea for a short story collection and I plan to work on that in the year to come. I'm excited to have lots of varied ideas and projects and it feels great to be excited about writing again. 

Hope this month finds all of you well!