Twenty Goals for 2020

I’m not a big person for setting goals, well not small ones. I generally have one goal and that is to achieve everything… So, as unhelpful as that is, I’ve decided to give myself twenty goals for 2020.

1. Publish The Black Death Trilogy

I’ve been talking about this trilogy for a long time. Far too long. Originally, it was a joint project with two other authors. We each wrote a story set in England as an outbreak of the bubonic plague swept the nation and possibly the world. It was such an exciting project that I put all my own stuff on hold to hammer through the first drafts. The other authors did the same. Then, having completed all three of my parts and another author completed his, we waited for the third author. After a long time of waiting, the third author pulled out, leaving us to come up with the shortfall in word count. We’ve been working on it during the second half of 2019 and I’m going to get this beast over the finish line and release all three books this year.

2. Watch 1,000 episodes of Anime

In each of the last two years, I’ve managed to easily breeze past the one-thousand episode mark and I want to do that again in 2020. I had a number of breaks in my anime watching as I relocated to New Zealand and then to Canada, but now I’m settled, I need to catch up on all the great shows I missed in that time.

3. Read 100 volumes of Manga

I did this in 2018 but fell well short in 2019. I measure my manga by volumes and not chapters as I generally read the paper copies and not digital versions. Luckily, I have a pretty awesome library with a massive stock of manga to get through.

4. Reach 300 WordPress Followers

As of writing this, I am at 146 followers which means I’m looking to more than double my number of followers. It seems a little bit of a stretch, but I like to have something to work towards and hopefully with all the different types of posts I have planned for this year it should be a breeze…

5. Gain 100 Facebook Page Likes

This target may be the toughest one yet as I currently have zero FaceBook Page likes, excluding myself. Admittedly, I did start a new page when I relaunched this website and part of that was because most of my likes for my old page were family and friends and the interaction was minimal. Now, I love my family and friends, but I want this version to be more about finding people with similar interests. So, if you have a Facebook account and would be willing to hit like on my page, it would be massively appreciated.

6. Publish a Science-fiction Novel

Several years ago I wrote a sci-fi time travel murder mystery novel for NaNoWriMo and have been meaning to do something with it for years. It’s completely bonkers and that’s not totally surprising given that Douglas Adams is one of my favourite authors. Anyhow, it’s only in the first draft stage and would need a complete rewrite, but it will be a nice way to clean the palette before I start work on my fantasy series again.

7. Complete 10 Full-colour Pictures

At the beginning of 2019, I started a series of posts where I would sketch a manga or anime character each week. Well, I got some fancy paper and pens for Christmas and want to push this out a bit more and do 10 full-colour pictures, possibly with the idea of using some as cover art for my stories. That’s right, expect some original art in there too.

8. Average One Post a Day Minimum

So far so good, right? I know that last year I average one post a day and for several months I was actually trying to stop myself from posting so much, but this year, I’m going to own it. I’ve worked on a new format for the seasonal reviews and that’ll free up loads of time so I can work on both fiction and blogging.

9. Climb One-Hundred Flights of Stairs

In 2018 I decided to stop taking the elevator at work and start using the stairs. Then, I started adding extra flights to keep me active. At one point, I think I was doing eighty flights a day. Since I took a year off to look after my son my stair climbing has dropped off significantly. So, I want to get to the point where I can do one-hundred flights in a day by the end of the year.

10. Resume Work on my Fantasy Series

If you go to Amazon and search for my name, you may find a series of ebooks that I published. There are eight novellas in the Valiant Lineage series. During my time off work, I spent a lot of time thinking about the series and am going to completely rewrite it into a series of novels or light novels. I have planned out the series and just need to put the time in to write and edit it now. This isn’t exactly a hard target, but I just need to get the ball rolling again with this one.

11. One Million Views on Ecchi Hunter

You may or may not be aware, but I have another website that is focused on ecchi anime – EcchiHunter.com. If you like fan service in your anime, then you may want to check out our site that I run with Yomu from the Umai Yomu Anime Blog. We started the site in June of 2019 and amazingly had over 100,000 views in 2019! So, we’re going big for 2020 and have set a goal of 1,000,000 views. It’s a completely crazy and unbelievable number, but we never thought we’d get this far, so why not?

12. Twenty Thousand Views

Not nearly as impressive, but I’m going to aim for twenty-thousand views here on the Otaku Author. On the old URL before the relaunch, I managed over thirty-thousand views, but that also had a couple of years worth of content. I’m starting small here and will look to compete with Ecchi Hunter in about thirty years…

13. A Full Year of Saturday Spin-off

One of the new series of posts that I’ll be running in 2020 is where I look at a series that I’ve already watched and pitch a spin-off series. It’s mostly for fun, but it will give me a chance to exercise my creative muscles. Who knows, I may end up getting some great ideas for my own stories off the back of it. So, for this goal, I just need to keep them up going all year.

14. A Full Year of Sunday Sevens

I started this series at the beginning of 2019 and lost steam. It’s my version of the list post, but I chose to go with seven as I had recently watched Samurai Seven and that seemed like a good idea. It was also with one of these posts that I created the My Pirate Crew tag post that made the rounds. I’d love to come up with a new tag post, but just keeping this going all year will be achievement enough.

15. Rebuild my Pinterest Account

I have a Pinterest account that I’ve been using for years. It has more than 15,000 pins (and I’ve cleaned it up several times), but when I relaunched, I went all the way and made a new account. So, if you want to see tons of anime images, then you can follow me here. I think I currently have one follower…

16. Revisit Some of My Favourite Anime

I already mentioned this in my review of December, but I plan on doing full dives into some of my favourite anime series. My goal is to work out why I liked it and see what I can learn from them. Hopefully, this will also be useful to others and if that’s the case, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

17. Comment on More Posts

Likes are great and all, but I want to comment more on the posts I read. I generally only like the posts I do read, but a comment is a great way to show some appreciation to the author of the post. I will avoid any post that is from a series I haven’t seen as I really, really hate spoilers…

18. Focus More on the Author Side of Things

I have fully invested in the Otaku Author brand and for the most part, things are focused very clearly on the Otaku side. Sure, I’m adjusting my reviews to include more on the story elements and what I’m taking away from the episode/series, but I want to put some posts together that look at a specific element in a series. The first one I’m planning is focused on the foreshadowing in Cautious Hero.

19. Write More!

This is one of those completely loose goals and is just about me putting down more words. More blog posts, more fiction, more everything. Luckily, I have a few different things tracking everything I do, so it should be easy to see if I am writing more. This is what I want to do with my life and if I don’t put in the effort it’s never going to happen.

20. Lose Fifty Pounds

I’m running out of ideas and this seems like a pretty good one to add in at the end. I’m currently 250 pounds and while some of that is muscle it’s definitely not good for my joints. So, I’m going to try to slim down and focus on lean muscle and not bulk. Sorry, Machio!

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Well, that seems like a fairly comprehensive list of things to do and should be more than enough to keep me busy. It’s going to be interesting to see what I can accomplish and what has to wait until next year.

Other shows I’m watching

Discounted and Free Books

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