Happy Monday, Reader,

We are about to crossed the halfway point of the year, and I want to tell you something I don't normally do. I'm going to show you my goals. The real ones, the ones I set back in January when the year still felt like a wide open road and I still believed I could do everything at once.

Here's what I told myself I'd do by June. Launch the business properly, with a pipeline of three to five clients a month. Get my coaching certifications done, all nine of them. Write scenes for a story idea. Launch the First Draft Club. Market the digital products I've already built. Write my weekly newsletter. And somewhere in there, drink more water and start exercising, because apparently I thought I could overhaul my entire professional life and also fix my health habits at the same time.

How much of that got done? Content consistency. I set a weekly newsletter goal and I hit it every week except one, and even that one still went out, just late. The digital products exist, they're built, the gap is marketing them, not creating them. And I've been drinking more water, though my body would probably like me to prioritize that a lot higher than I have been.

The rest? Started but not where I wanted it to be, or on hold until something else falls into place first, or just plain not moving. And that's the honest version, the one I don't usually say out loud because it sounds like a list of failures when the truth is more complicated than that.

I have ADHD. Most of you know that already. And one of the things ADHD does, one of the things it does to me anyway, is it makes staying on track with goals feel like trying to hold water in your hands. I can see the goal clearly. I can want it badly. I can make the plan and believe in the plan and feel absolutely certain that this time, this time, I'm going to follow through. And then my brain shifts, and the plan I was so sure about three days ago feels like it belongs to someone else, and I'm onto the next thing, and the thing I was working on gets quieter and quieter until I forget it was ever a priority at all.

That's not laziness. It's not a character flaw. It's how my brain works, and I've spent a lot of years beating myself up for it before I understood what it actually was. But understanding what it is doesn't make it less real, and it doesn't make the gap between what I planned and what I produced any smaller. It just means I know why the gap exists, and knowing why is only useful if it changes what I do next.

That's why I'm doing a mid-year audit. Not because I want to, because I really don't. Nobody wants to sit down and look at what they didn't finish. It's uncomfortable in a specific way that makes you want to close the tab and tell yourself you'll do it later, and later turns into never. But I'm doing it anyway, because the alternative is worse. The alternative is carrying goals that expired months ago and calling them active, dragging the weight of intentions I had in January as if they still describe what I want in June, and spending the second half of the year running a race I already stopped caring about and don't remember entering.

For me, the audit is about accountability to myself. As a writer, as someone running a business, as a person who has goals she wants to see completed one day. Not perfect, not all at once, but completed. And the only way to know which goals still matter and which ones are just ghosts of January ambitions is to actually look at the full picture, the things I finished and the things I didn't, and decide from there what deserves my energy for the next six months.

I think most writers are in a version of this position right now, whether they have ADHD or not. Half the year is gone, and the goals they set with January optimism are sitting there, half-done or barely started, and the temptation is to either pretend they don't exist or to double down on them out of guilt without asking whether they still make sense. Neither of those moves you forward. The first one keeps you stuck in avoidance, and the second one keeps you stuck in a plan that was never designed for the person you are now, it was designed for the person you thought you'd be, and that person doesn't exist.

We spent last month talking about what keeps writers stuck before they even start. The myth of readiness, the perfectionism that looks like care, the demands we place on ourselves before we give ourselves permission to begin. This month we're moving from what blocks you to what you've actually built, and what you want to do about it from here. And that starts with looking at where you actually are, which is the part most people skip.

The thing about an audit is that it only works if you count everything. Most writers, when they assess how the year has gone, count finished work. Pages written, drafts completed, submissions sent. Those count, but they're only part of what happened in six months of being a writer. The craft book that changed how you think about dialogue counts. The feedback that cracked something open in your revision counts. The week you spent wrestling with a scene that wouldn't work, and the understanding you walked away with about why it wouldn't work, that counts. The writing community you joined, the beta reader relationship you built, the craft essay that gave you language for something you'd been feeling but couldn't articulate, all of that counts. It's the work beneath the work, and if you only count the finished product, your audit will always tell you you're further behind than you actually are.

So here's what I'm asking you to do, and here's what I'm doing myself before next week. Take five minutes and write down what you've actually done as a writer since January. All of it. The pages and the craft work and the reading and the community and the lessons you learned the hard way. Don't rank it. Don't judge it. Just list it. Let yourself see the full picture for once instead of the cropped version that only shows what's finished.

And if you notice a gap between what you planned and what happened, stay with it for a minute. That gap is the most useful information you have right now. It tells you something about what your year actually required of you, and whether the goals you set in January accounted for any of it.

Next week we're going to talk about where those January goals actually came from. Because some of them were yours, and some of them were never yours to begin with, and knowing the difference changes everything about what you do with the second half of this year.

Maria Acosta Ramirez Accountability & Mindset Coach | Alpha Reader, MAR Literary Services Florida, USA gravatar.com/unabashedd4deba3b56 ​

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PS: The Beyond The Wordcount Worksheet I gave you in December is the perfect place to start your mid-year audit. You can download it here: https://marliteraryservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Beyond-the-Word-Count-Worksheet.docx

PPS: If you'd rather not do this alone, I'm opening a handful of one-on-one accountability sessions this month specifically for mid-year audits. One hour, no fluff, just an honest look at where you are and a clear plan for where you're going. Reply to this email to grab a spot.