January Update: Accomplishments and Goals

I didn't manage my "where am I going, where have I been" post last month, so I decided to do a recap of 2016 and a look ahead at 2017 for my January post.

The bad news first. I never got my writing mojo back last year. Three months I was dead in the water. I never finished that dream story for the Cafe. I did find an ending for one story I was working on, but haven't written it. I managed to pull out a story the day before the post went live on the Cafe about something completely different, so I didn't let the Cafe down. But it wasn't the story I wanted to tell.

I didn't keep with my timeline for 2016. I had planned on finishing up Book 3 this month, but I still haven't written more than a couple thousand words on it. And I never did finish the last episode of the first season of my adventure novel.

I did not participate in National Novel Writing Month for the first time since I found out about it over a decade ago.

I missed several writing meetings, write-ins, and get togethers.

But. Good news. In 2016, I:

• Finished editing Monsters of Lawrence
• Finished writing Towers of Kansas, which I started back in 2012
• Did first round edits for Towers of Kansas
• Finished writing episode three of my adventure series
• Wrote episode four of my adventure series
• Started episode five of my adventure series
• Finished writing the first book in the Druid Wars series
• Did an editing treatment for Online Dating for Demons so it's ready for dev edits
• Wrote a flash fiction for the 24-hour writing contest, which is currrently on submission
• Wrote seven stories for the Confabulator Cafe
• Managed the Cafe so that it had at least four stories every single month in 2016
• Spoke on six panels and did a reading at ConQuest
• Wrote a story-in-a-bag for ConQuest
• Attended my first WorldCon
• Wrote twelve blog posts for the year (even if it wasn't one a month, it was close)
• Overall, wrote over 115,000 words on various projects and spent countless hours editing
• And even though it wasn't ready, I did query Book 1 with six different agents

In addition to all of that writing, I also edited two novels and three novellas for three different clients.

I had a solid year. I made the project timeline. I followed it until the last couple of months. I cataloged all of my stories and found ways to fix them all. I made concrete goals and good progress toward them.

So. This year, my goals are to:

• Write Scions of Mythos
• Sell or self-publish Monsters of Lawrence
• Send Towers of Kansas to beta readers and incorporate their edits
• Finish the first season of my adventure novellas
• Start the second season of my adventure novellas
• Write at least six stories for the Cafe (and keep the Cafe running)
• Edit Druid Wars Book 1 for beta readers
• Start writing Druid Wars Book 2
• Do dev edits for Online Dating for Demons
• Help run Reader Con in October
• Write a blog update every month, even if I have nothing to report.

It's ambitious for me, especially since it's a lot more of the same, which is stuff I've been struggling to work on for the last three months without any luck.

But I did learn some valuable lessons. One, timelines are great, but they have to be flexible. Two, I will get burned out, so I have to work hard during the good months and go easy on myself during the tough ones. Three, NaNoWriMo is time for new projects, not continuing old ones. I need to keep expanding the various worlds I have at my disposal, and I will do better with a clean slate than trying to continue in other worlds for NaNo.

It seems daunting now, in the depths of my SAD, but I know I won't be in this pit forever. I will write again. And I will see one of my books in print this year, even if I have to put it out there myself.

And thus begins year six of this blog! Only four more years.

It's crazy how time flies.