Category: 2025

Posted in 2025, Word for the Year

2025 Word for the Year – Path

Posted on by beckylevine

My word for 2025 is Path.

I retired just over two years ago, and I feel like I’ve gotten to a place where my retirement “rhythm” is working for me. I’m basically doing what I’ve wanted to do my whole life–writing creatively–what I’ve had to push at least a bit to the side while I did paying-job writing. Obviously, some days/weeks are more focused & productive than others, but overall I feel like I’m keeping stories at the top of my priority list.

But I’ve also reached one of those life stages where other people around me are experiencing their own shifts and transitions. These are people I love, people I want to support, people whose rhythms I have absolutely no control over. So I know my own rhythm is going to get interrupted. My consistency will take some hits. My focus will get pulled away. All of that is good.

But my writing job will be to keep weaving a path for my writing, as these changes come and go. To remember that my writing is waiting for me, to touch base with it when I can, and to remember that picking it up again means forward movement. I think the last two years have set me up for that, and I’m beyond grateful that I’ve had this time to get my own rhythm set.

Posted in 2025

Setting My 2025 Writing Goals

Posted on by beckylevine

I don’t tend to do annual writing goals, but thanks to this post by Christine Evans and Vicky Fang at their Kidlit Survival Guide Substack, I decided to give it a try this year. I’m feeling the need to add a bit of structure to my life, anyway, and this seems a possible starting point. The important piece of their post, for me, is that the goals need to be things I actually have some control over. So even though getting an agent stays at the top of my wish list, I am not setting it out as an actual goal.

So, working under the premise that, if I say it out loud, I actually have to do it, here are my current writing goals for 2025.

  • Revise my current PB WIP to the point where I think it’s ready to query, then actually start querying it. I’d like to say that this is going to be easy, since I’ve already been revising it for the past six months or so, but…if it were easy, everyone would be doing it!
  • Write a first draft of at least one picture book that feels, to me, like it’s worth revising to the query stage. This means I have to love the story premise and/or character, I need to be able to see a path to revision, and the story includes multiple elements that will make it stand out in agent and editor inboxes. One qualifier: I can go back through earlier drafts of stories I’ve let go because they didn’t meet these criteria, in case I see something new and exciting in any of them.
  • Start writing a chapter book. For several years, I’ve been calling myself a picture book writer with aspirations of writing chapter books. Well, time to quit aspiring and actually try to do it. I have some VERY loose ideas, and of course I’m letting myself jot those down. But before that, I need to make some definite headway toward reading 100 chapter books AND breaking them down, chapter by chapter, into each of the main story elements.

Do you set writing goals for the year? Feel free to share in a comment!