If you took the “Write 50 Books a Year” workshop, which I teach for free every August, this will be really familiar! I do something like this at the start of every workshop for a very good reason! Putting your dreams down on paper sets an internal switch in your brain called the RAS (Reticular Activating System—the part of the brain that controls awareness/arousal). The way this works is you write down your goals, and then you read them aloud. You don’t even have to believe they’re going to happen, but your brain hears the words and resets its expectations. Magic happens.

You’ve probably heard that children will live down to their parent’s lowest expectations—that’s based on what they’ve heard their parents say about them. Sad to say, if they’d heard encouragement, their brain would have been “trained” to achieve greater things.

Define Your Goals

1) The Big Bang

This is the time to dream big. Imagine what you want to have accomplished after five years of dedicated effort. Write your back cover biography!

Here’s mine:

Delilah Devlin, author of oodles of erotic romances featuring hot gratuitous sex, spends her winters in southern France with her Argentinean polo player, and spends her summers in Alaska with her not-so-Gentle-Ben backwoodsman. A regular on the New York Times Bestseller List and the Howard Stern show, she is writing an adaptation of her My Immortal Knights series for a new Playgirl channel series with celebrated screenwriter Elle James.

Okay, so I had a bit of fun with mine. Got yours done? Now print it and tape it to the wall above your computer. Read it aloud to yourself. Try to make this your daily mantra as you sit down to write. Don’t underestimate the power of “setting” your brain’s internal switch to achieve your big dream.

2) Imagine what you have to accomplish to reach that Big Bang goal—then pare it down to your wish list of what you want to accomplish over the next year. For me, it’s writing the best books I can, having a terrific time doing it (because positive energy generates positive results!!), and doing a lot of it. But when I list incremental goals, it looks something like this:

#1 Write 2 single title books this year
#2 Prepare 4 new proposals this year
#3 Write 3 category/novella length novels for Ellora’s Cave
#4 Write 3 category/novella length novels for Samhain
#5 Write 4 short stories for Cleis collections

Don’t freak when you see this list. I always start with stars in my eyes and have to ratchet down my expectations once reality (and the real planning) begins. But this is what I wish I could accomplish over the next year.

So, it’s your turn to write your bio and your To Do list!

Oh yeah—I now have the little black dragon with the long tail. So it’s two dragons down! ~DD