Looking Forward/Looking Back

2013 Year in Writing

Novels finished: 2

Stories started: 4

Previously started stories touched but not finished: 2

Stories started in calendar year 2013 finished: 0

Books published: 1

Estimated words written, new fiction: 100,000

All in all, not too bad for a year which continued the heavy workload at my day job and also saw my honeymoon, my first DragonCon cosplay crunch, the horrible and debilitating first trimester of my first pregnancy, and the continuing drain on my energy through trimester 2.

2014 in Perspective

I begin 2014 in a state of waiting.

My life is going to change forever sometime in mid-spring, and while part of me feels like I should be desperately working to achieve a few writing goals in the last months I am yet childless, the truth is…I do not have the energy or mental capacity to pursue any goal relentlessly. (The second trimester energy surge is a lie! A brutal lie told by true believers who are simply too un-self-aware to recognize that their energy is merely more than it was during the first trimester but nowhere near what it was before pregnancy! I, at least, have empirical data to prove that I am still only at 75% capacity.)

Now that the stress and flurry of tasks relating to publishing a book are almost done (in direct work, I need to send review copies out to the few bloggers who reviewed one of my prior books, as a thank you for those kind and/or instructive words as much as for particular hopes of more publicity…and I still have to re-do the covers and files for the Twelfth Night novellas), I am planning to refocus on writing. I think I will have to go back to doing it in the mornings before work–I’m just too drained after work to try in the evenings–and that will mean forcing myself to go to bed early, perhaps earlier than is really comfortable for me (8 o’clock versus 10).

I am setting a few goals for myself for the year.

• finish A Yuletide Wedding (prequel/companion to A Christmastide Courtship)
• revise the novel I finished last spring that I know needs so much work
• write the 4 companion short stories/novellas that go with Courtship and the other novel, so I can close those loops in my imagination and move on to other character sets
• finish one of the other novels I have started…either the one I was working on last summer and abandoned before DCon, never (yet) to go back to, or the one I started during NaNo that is still at the forefront of my imagination

Looking at expected word counts for the various pieces, this would put my desired production for the year somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 words – an eminently achievable goal if I can stay focused for the winter and early spring, and get back into the groove of writing not too long after the baby comes (preferably before I go back to work from maternity leave!). If the work were to be split evenly across 50 weeks of the year, that would be 3000-4000 words per week. Even splitting it across only 37 weeks (giving myself a full 15 off for baby) yields 4050-5400. Those are realistic weekly word goals, if I actually put my ass in the chair four or five days a week for an hour or two of focused writing time.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found more general resolutions to be better than really specific ones (goals are not the same as resolutions!). So this year I am giving myself only two, or really it’s maybe one and a half since the second is a reprise of my 2013 resolution:

Don’t panic.

Finish it.

Finish it