End of the Year Update

Well, here we are on the final day of 2012, and I find I’ve been sorely overdue for a blog update, so I thought I’d do one in the form of a year-end progress report. 

My word totals this year finished out at just over two hundred thousand, about half of what I did last year.  I attribute this to several factors:  Spending more time researching and world building for the novel, reading more, and a bit of burnout that set in toward the end of the year.  But I’ve had a good rest over the holidays, and I think I’ll be ready to hit it hard again the first of the year. 

I still think I’ll try to get back to my thousand words a day goal, at least for the foreseeable future, as it is doable, and tends to keep me sharp.  I do think I need to come up with some new story/plot generators, as some of the older methods that I’ve mentioned here in the blog have started to falter. 

Other than writing, as I mentioned, I did start reading more heavily in the last couple months of the year.  I’d decided that I hadn’t been reading enough, and a writer really needs to be a reader as well, practically constantly, so I knocked out twelve novels as of today, including a reread of some old favorites like Tolkien and Crowley’s Little, Big, as well as some new stuff and some Kurt Vonnegut that I hadn’t read before.  I think in the new year I will keep up the reading, trying to allow an hour or two each morning so I can knock out 50-60 pages or so.  Then I’ll spend the afternoon writing. 

My submissions also dropped off in 2012.  In ’11, I pulled off 100 subs, but of course I had a pretty large back catalog I was drawing from, and I also had a lot of flash and shorts from the 400K words I wrote last year.  In 2012, I managed 27 subs, with eleven sales, so a pretty good ratio.

One thing I did a lot of this year was flash fiction, which I enjoy, and will continue to do, but I really want to try to get more work in the 4000-6000 word range in 2013, and with these pieces try to crack more pro markets.  So the sales may fall from what I’ve been doing, but ultimately I think it will be more satisfying in the long run.  I think a good plan will be to devote a week or so a month to writing a short of this length, and the rest of the time I can work on the novel.  That should give me a shot at twelve decent length stories for the year, as well as progress on the novel. 

So, that’s about it.  Time to hunker down and try to add at least a thousand more words or so to those 2012 totals.  Happy New Year!