Since I started this site a few years back, I’ve posted my goals for the new year and gone back through them to update my progress as the year progresses. Here are my goals and updates for 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 for interested people. That’s four years of writing goals that chart my career, my work, and how I’ve grown over the years.
As always, I hope this provides any writer a roadmap and inspiration to design their careers. It also bears noting that I am a full-time writer with no other job but writing and editing.
Last Updated: January 2025
2024 Intention: Write thought-provoking work
Start MFA program- I’ve been accepted to one program, Bennington, and am waiting to hear back from the other, Iowa. I already know my focus and have started sketching out some potential books, essays, and other writings.
- May Update: I was rejected from Iowa, but took my Bennington acceptance and am running with it! I’ve already started doing a lot of the work, but my first residency is in June and that will officially kick off all the work I’ll be doing to get my masters. You can read more about my journey on my MFA Journey blog post.
- August Update: As of today, I’m about four months into my program and it’s kicking my ass in every single good way. I went over a bit of my decision process and shared my essays from applying to grad school in a recent MFA Journey – Deciding on a Grad School post. I’m working on a blog post about my residency experience this past June when I went to Vermont to meet my cohort and teacher.
- January Update: Oh, is grad school hitting and happening. I am starting my second term and have two more and one more year to go before graduating in 2026.
Write horror thriller novel- My next book project is going to be a standalone horror novel about religion, addiction, and our responsibility to home. There’s already a 30,000 word outline and character sketches, and I’m aiming to start writing it sometime between May and October.
- May Update: Outline is officially finished and I’ll be working on the novel through grad school and using it as my fiction thesis. I’ll be spending the next couple of months sketching out all the characters. My new drafting plan has me starting in September or October and spending my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th term writing and editing the novel.
- August Update: I’ve pushed my drafting start day back to November to give myself a little more time to sketch out the characters and setting. There’s been some work on this, but not as much as I would like to get started in October—plus I’ll be moving that month and will have a little less focus.
- January Update: I’m 80K into the novel and aiming to finish the first draft this month. It will most likely be my grad school thesis.
- Grow author newsletter to 500-1,000 subscribers
- The aim here is to grow organically and without using any marketing asshole tactics beyond basic SEO and good writing.
- May Update: I have been doing a lot of background planning for this and publishing regularly but haven’t put much real effort into this. This is mainly because the past few months I’ve been spending a lot of time prepping to head off for grad school and doing a cross country road trip.
- August Update: No growth really and no promoting outside my own space here or on the newsletter itself. I am always at a crossroads with this type of subscriber growth. A part of me knows how important it is to having a healthy author career and another part of me is just a hermit who doesn’t want to have to do the things I’d need to do to grow my subscribers to the heights I’d like.
- January Update: I didn’t really push for this, but have been getting steady subscriber growth as I’ve been serializing a horror novella through my Substack.
Read more creative criticism style reviews- I read a lot of reviewers already but I want to be more intentional about it and do a focused study and meditation on the practice.
- May Update: This has become a weekly practice of getting back into the rhythm of reading criticism from writers who are skilled at narrative storytelling and memoir writing. I usually grab reviews from Reactor, Booklist, the New Yorker, and other random places off the web and magazine racks.
- August Update: I’ve been incorporating this into my grad school studies to help inform my own essay writing for school. I will usually look up reviews of books I’m reading for school or a movie I’ve just seen to see how another relates to it.
- January Update: My grad school reading list was made a lot of books that focused on critical analysis and helped inform my own writing for my grad school essays.
Mentor Black writers and writers in local community- This is already underway and I am mentoring a writer for the next four months while I sketch out a plan to set up some sort of local writing mentorship with an organization or on my own.
- May Update: I spend the first half of 2024 working as an HWA mentor with a talented Black writer. While getting started with grad school and settling in, I won’t be doing a lot of mentoring—outside of offering services and advice to other Black writers as they reach out and ask.
- August Update: I am gonna hold off on doing more of this for the rest of the year while I finish my first term at grad school. I’ll bring this back in during 2025.
Write skill challenging stories- For this, I need to do a skill assessment, story assessment, and overall honest look at my current skills. I’ve mapped out some story structures, styles, and techniques that I am very unfamiliar with and aim to write a story or so a month using one of them.
- May Update: Oh man! I’ve been working on a challenging story for the past year or so and have pushed most other creative work aside. I’m using the 1st term of grad school to finish working on the novelette and am hoping of finding a market to submit it to by the end of the year.
- August Update: Just a couple of weeks ago, I completed the novelette I’ve been talking about writing for the past year (forest monster, suicide, Joanna Newsom and Stephen King rewrite The Faculty). And I just finished the first draft of a new story that is extremely challenging of my skills. It’s a complicated and disturbing story where instead of using my poetic lyricism to make the disturbing relatable and beautiful, I’m leaning into simple prose that carries a lot of weight in what it describes.
- January Update: Last year, I wrote maybe three or so stories. One of those was the novelette that I mentioned above that actually turned into a novella in the end. The other is a short story where I take myth creation into my own hands and make a new horror of American imagination.
Study history, science, psychology- This is an ongoing goal from 2023 that is an intentional reading journey into subjects outside of my regular work to help influence my stories and for general interest. For the past year, I’ve read history, science, and psychology books in broad categories from nature, to hate, to community, to literary state histories, and whatever other books in those areas catch my attention.
- May Update: I’ve been going through this steady, reading at least 2-3 books from these subjects a month. I’m in the process of slacking from some grad school work, so I won’t go digging for the titles I read over the past six or so months, but I can see that it’s shaping not only the way I look at the world, but the way I organize my stories and what types of details I include.
- August Update: Still keeping on and keeping on. If you want a more detailed list of what I’m reading, follow me on Storygraph (@aignerloren).
- January Update: Read books, watch lectures and documentaries, and read articles related to these topics and am gonna continue my study into it in 2025.
Study craft topics tension and action- Last year, I spent my dedicated craft learning time studying setting and description. Each year I do this type of technique study, it has a noticeable impact on my craft and stories, so I keep this goal going, choosing different techniques each year. For my dedicated study, I’ll read books, take classes, participate in workshops, and perform a lot of deliberate practice.
- May Update: I have been doing this loosely over the past few months because of my refocus to prepping for grad school and getting my work in order to start. What I’ve mainly been doing with this is paying attention to stories I read and how they splice action and emotion in a scene to keep the reader grounded and emotionally invested.
- August Update: Like with a few other goals, this one is wrapped up in my grad school work. I’ve been reading books each month to help me get a better handle on keeping my tension and action tight without losing the skill of my prose.
- January Update: Toward the end of the year, I started focusing on using fiction and poetry books to help teach me how to up the tension and action descriptions in my stories. Through lots of critiques, I found out that I have increased clarity across the board when it comes to the action and added an additional layer of visceral tension to my stories.
Read author bios and craft books- The reading lists for these are already made and posted here and here. I’ll be sharing some essays and reflections from my readings and am doing a book club for the author bios reading.
- May Update: At this point of the year, I was hoping to have five books done off this list, but only have read three. I’ve been reading Asimov’s In Memory Yet Green for the past three months because it is a 800 page autobiography that details everything from his writing career to sick days. It’s a slog that I’ve considered abandoning every month, but I’m within 200 pages of the end, so am going to try and finish it before the end of the month. I have been able to write up a review of Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation over on Writing Skins.
- August Update: I’ve kinda fall away from reading many author bios like I had originally planned, but I have been reading some craft books for school.
- January Update: I didn’t read as many author bios as I wanted to but I did read a few craft books that were helpful, like Meander, Spiral, and Explode which taught me how to build story structures out of natural patterns in nature.
Develop creative nonfiction skills- Spending sometime deepening my skills and growing my practice into this topic. Over the next two years while I do my MFA program, I won’t be pitching articles and pieces (for the most part). I will, however, continue writing articles and essays for my own growth and learning.
- May Update: This ties into the creative criticism goal, so I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction and learning what I can about how to develop my skills and become a better nonfiction writer.
- August Update: This is one of my more exciting goals I’m working on. As part of my grad work, I have to write two essays a month that I’m using as a way of exploring and deepening my creative nonfiction skills. I just shared an essay on my author newsletter, too, if anyone is interested in what and how I’m writing now.
- January Update: My nonfiction skills and my fiction skills this past year have gone up in a noticeable way. I’ve pulled back from publishing as much but am getting back into it now and am hoping of having new articles and essays out for people to read soon.
All and all, 2024 was a wild ride and I’m glad I made it through. I’ve grown accept the organizer in me and to push for writing me diverse and wild stories that shake my readers and make them think and feel things they never imagined.
If you’re new to the website, consider subscribing to stay up to date with all my posts. I normally post once or twice a month and it’s always about writing and my author career. I’m Aigner! An award nominated writer of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and all things weird. You can check out all my stories here.
Aigner Loren Wilson 
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