Do you know what one of the most common New Year’s Resolutions is? OK, it slots in under ‘lose weight’ and ‘stop drinking’, but ‘writing a novel’ is a pretty common one to come up with on New Year’s Day. After all, everyone has a book in them, right? And what better time to dig it out, before it gets covered with all the assorted detritus of 2015.

My advice to anyone sitting down in front of their computers, cursors poised to open ‘MY NOVEL – 2015’?

Don’t.

In fact, that’s not dramatic enough. Imagine me throwing myself in slow motion across the room (imagine a svelter me, since ‘stick to the diet’ was my resolution), hand flung out to grab the mouse.

Dooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnn’t do it!

I mean, write. Write all you like. Write romances, write fantasy, write horror and crime. The more writing, the better. I mean, as a writer I could probably justify nobbling the competition; as a reader, I want more new worlds, more new authors to follow and recommend to everyone I know.

So, yes. Write a novel in 2015. Start a novel in January 2015. Get cracking. Just don’t start writing because it’s January 2015. That way lies disappointment, self-recrimination and a little folder sitting on a corner of the screen that you never, ever click.

That’s because a New Year’s Resolution novel is all stick and no carrot. You’re not writing towards a goal, you’re writing away from one. There’s also a whole lot of word count pressure on a book that’s still in the nascent, poking at dubiously stages. Instead of pinning down your big plotline and working out the rules of the world, you’re desperately trying to hit the word count that will satisfy the next ‘how’s your book coming on, then?’ query.

So, you expend all your writing energy in a mad frenzy in January. Then March (and let’s be honest, I’m being MAD generous with that timeline and assuming you all have more will power than I do!) rolls around, you hit the point in the novel where you realise you probably should have had more of a plot and no-one is asking about your New Year’s Resolution anymore. Now, you could join a writers group or find a writing partner to poke you on, but mostly what happens is that the book goes into the digital drawer to gather dust.

Resolutions suck. They have no teeth.

If you want to write a novel, don’t start with a resolution. Kick things off with a goal.

For me, I work well to deadlines. They are the pointy stick at your back, remind you there’s only three months or two weeks or three days left to go. The most pressure to perform is as you go into the final furlong, when you need that hook to keep you writing through the doldrums of the book (that moment when there’s less left unwritten than there is written, and you just sort of go jellyfish as if your part is down and from now on it will write itself).

My latest work in progress was sent off on January 1 – dead on the publisher’s open call deadline!. That poke of ‘you’ve only a few days left’ kept me writing, even through a rather trying Christmas season (it involved, at one point, a man in an Xmas pudding hat dipping rainwater out of a freshly dug grave).

However, some people go tharn when exposed to a looming deadline. So why not take on a challenge? Then there’s the ever-popular morning pages, which requires you to write three hand-written pages of stream-of-consciousness writing first thing every morning. It’s not something that’s ever worked for me – my hand writing is atrocious and I once put coca-cola in my coffee instead of milk first thing, so not too functional – but I know people who swear by it.

The thing is, your goal doesn’t have to be a terrifying nanowrimo number. If you think you can write 400 words a day, make your goal 500 words. If you think you write a page every morning, make it two. Then just do your best to stick to it.

(Some advice based on my previously mentioned diet? Some days you don’t hit your target and accidentally eat a giant box of chocolates. That’s fine…ish. Just don’t decide, I’m having a day off today. Failure happens, avoidance is contagious,)

So, write in 2015. Write lots. Let me know even! And if you are looking for some deadlines:

Riptide Publishing – Sweet Romance -March 1 (This is more for the people who need a poke to finish a WIP. Although if you think you can hit 25,000 words…).

We’re seeking sweet romances: any orientation, any topic, any genre . . . zero explicit sex. Fade to black is fine, as is no sex at all. We want teen-appropriate stories, even if the stories themselves are not actually YA or NA.

Dreamspinner Press – Bare Studs – May 1

Dreamspinner Press is seeking romantic short stories featuring rough-and-tumble blue collar working men. Stories should feature happy or promising endings.

Torquere Press – Love in a Uniform – Aug 15

Who doesn’t love a man in uniform? All kinds of uniforms can make for sizzling fantasies, including military, police, fire, EMT, postmen, or deliverymen, when they’re stuffed with hot men hungry for a good time!