December To-Do’s for Writers

What can writers do in that awkward, unbalanced writing time between mid December and the New Year? I’ve got 22 fun ideas!

1. Update your email signature to link to your website.
2. Read a book totally outside your genre.
3. Stay up way past your bedtime and observe the winter (for those in the northern hemisphere) starry sky. Often the winter night sky is clearer because there is less humidity. Speaking of winter skies, the feature image for this post is the northeastern sky as viewed from our house at sunset. The two dots are Venus and Jupiter, and Venus is the brighter of the two.
4. Shop for next year’s writer’s journal.
5. Shop for next year’s reader’s journal.
6. Update your author photo.
7. Set up your bujo for the coming year.
8. Write a Christmas story or article while the atmosphere is rich with the season. I wrote a guest post for Horror Addicts that explains the connection between Santa and my childhood fears: Demon Pigs and Other Childhood Fears
9. Skills practice. For example, make similes lists, eavesdrop on conversations at McDonald’s and jot down speech patterns, or write poems to help strengthen your prose aesthetics.
10. Try out a new e-planner app or buy your new paper planner for the upcoming year.
11. Work on goals for following year.
12. Update your author profile on Goodreads, your website, Amazon, etc.
13. Make a donation to the Dollar General Literacy Foundation: https://www.dgliteracy.org
14. Spend an hour daydreaming, no purpose in mind whatsoever. (It’s supposed to be good for your brain.)
15. Update your business cards.
16. Study a book on the craft of writing. Writing Scary Scenes by Rayne Hall is accessible and helpful, but I like Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark a lot too.
17. Create a digital book cover.
18. Write a promotional short story for your upcoming novel.
19. Finish this year’s TBR. I am totally enjoying this! Right now I’m reading (and viscerally horrified by) Lee Allen Howard’s The Bedwetter.
20. Refresh your press kit on your website. (Hahaha, as if I had need for a press kit . . . maybe someday!)
21. Evaluate your website. Do the colors and header image reflect your brand?
22. Write a blog post or film a YT video and store it away for an emergency upload when you’re down with the flu in February and can’t see straight much less write a blog post or appear before a camera.

Have a super Christmas everyone!

Daydreaming is good for your brain: psychologytoday.com/us/blog/supersurvivors/201712/why-daydreaming-is-good-us

Feature image by my totally handsome and sweet husband at marsneeds.com.