I want it all - Turning my dreams into achievable goals

Where do you see yourself in five years? It is my most hated interview question. I usually answer something about working for whatever company I am applying to and moving my way up in knowledge and positions within. While this is not a lie, it is not my true five year plan. Of course, my five year plan is turning out to be ten or more years in the making, but that is a whole other thing.

My honest, outside the interview answer is : A successful author, living in England. 

Moving to England is a slightly more recent dream. I have always loved accents, British, Irish, Scottish are my top three (with a special mention to the Newfounlander accent - which is a more recent addition to my list), but I digress. I loved the pomp and circumstance of England - or what I imagined it to be. England was this romantic notion to me. And I dreamed of visiting. 

About twelve years ago I made some awesome online friends in England and we are still friends today! Chatting with them, skyping with them, it made my dream of visiting more - it made it a goal. Now I had two friends offering me a place to stay when I visited. All I needed was to pay my plane ticket! 

It would be eight years until my daughter and I got on that plane and spent three weeks in England for the Christmas holidays. I don't want to sound dramatic, but I really feel it's true. The moment I stepped off the plane in England - it felt like home. And it was on the way home from that trip - as my daughter and I talked about our experiences - that we decided together that moving to England was something we wanted to do. She will finish high school here in Montreal and then the plan is to move to England. 🇬🇧 I start the process for the paperwork to get my citizenship this coming year - with the help and experience from my amazing brother who wants his big sis around! 

Being a successful, *cough* famous author has been my biggest dream since I wrote my first story in middle school. I'd been making up and telling stories long before I ever put them to paper - my Barbie dolls had quite the adventurous and tumultuous lives! 

It's still my biggest most audacious dream. But while England has made its way to goal status, the famous author dream is still seems a little more out of reach. Something like this is not as easy to start to map out as eventually moving across the ocean, but I am working towards this dream.

My best friend and I have been writing a a series of novels. It is an amazingly fun labour of love. We are coauthoring these novels in different countries, on Facebook messenger. It is wild that we have over ten first drafts of novels for our series all written this way! But even with all those novels, chapters and words, we kept going. We kept saying we wanted to keep the momentum. Which is true. But sometimes I think we are afraid of starting the editing process because it means we are one step closer to putting out work out there to be scrutinized. 

This month we have begun that next step. We have gone back to the first novel in the series and have begun the process of editing, adding and rewriting. A tricky thing to do when we  are still working on Facebook messenger to do it, but I am excited to say that we have found our groove in this process as we did in the initial writing. 

This week we took another step toward making getting published a goal rather than a dream. We began posting our first book on wattpad. I heard Anna Todd talk about how she had written the whole After series there and was approached by wattpad to publish her work. While I don't necessarily believe that will also happen for us, I think it is an important first step for us to put our work out there where strangers as well as friends can read. (For those who are interested here is the https://my.w.tt/q1nyUs7Jk0)

These two steps have begun to make my dream of being a "famous" author a little more tangible. It is nerve wracking and exhilarating all at once.

What are your dreams and what are you doing to make them more tangible - to make them goals? Remember, most any dream can become a goal if you have a plan! 🥰