I’ve never been one of those ‘New Year, New Me’ people. You want to make a change? Do it. Do it now. Do it later, if you must, but don’t wait on the calendar to change. Calendars go, changing with a precision I understand about as clearly as my earliest ancestors watching the fiery sky ball go up and down.

 

2016 was a toughy.

Some good, some bad, some tough. Some really bad. It was also the first year I’ve tracked my writing. I’ve been writing off and on for years, but I’ve set a goal to be able to support my family with my writing in the future, and step one was to see just how much I can do. My daily schedule has more demands than ever since I became a father half-way through 2015, my partner and I moved in together, and she was unemployed, then unevenly employed, and now full-time employed, but on a different schedule than I am. So, when I’m home, I’m home alone with our son. It’s impossible to write with a computer on one knee and a toddler on the other. These aren’t complaints, just acknowledging what I have to plan around to be better this coming year.

2016’s goals? A review.

 

Going into 2016, I knew I wanted to write novels and non-fiction too, like so many others, (I have for years). But from what I learned  I wasn’t sure …. how. So this year, I listened to *all* the writing podcasts (seriously, there are so many and many of them are great!), lurked and read lots on kboards and lots of different facebook groups as well. I think I’ve got down what I need to do, but there’s still the doing. At least I have encouragement from my partner (check her out!)

I wrote quite a bit last year at the holidays, and I could hit 1000 words each day without too much trouble. It felt doable that first week, so I set 1000 words per day as my initial goal. It didn’t last long. I cut it back to 500 words per day, net on projects. No adding in journal writing, or blogging, etc. 500 words on fiction and/or nonfiction projects. That’s been more doable with the very little time I have available. But consistency has been a long way off, but I tally that up to how inconsistent my home-life “schedule” has been.

 

I did a little better hitting that 500 words/day goal, achieving just over 85,000 words in 2016. Yes, that’s not even half of my annual goal, but you know hitting it nearly every other day (statistically) is a big win for me. I’ve never measured my words before, I wasn’t sure what to go by, so this feels really good.

So, where did those words go? Well, another big win for me was publishing my first piece of fiction in the flash fiction series Mondays are Murder with Akashic Books. So, only 1000 words, but still — I’m proud of it. The other 85,000 words? Another small portion went into a non-fiction book I’ll be publishing soon. It’s the journal of a young teacher in western New York in 1887. It was a fun project, and I’ll have more about it soon in my facebook group.

 

I also worked on two different historical series — one is a mystery series set in 1930s Denver with a private investigator who is a veteran of the WWI air corps. The other is more of a thriller series set in the 1910s, featuring a female magazine writer who becomes the guardian of her young nephew and goes on adventures. These have been tons of fun to write and once I’m ready to launch you’ll be the first to know.

I was also short of my reading goals this year as well, but I tracked them better than before, but I definitely missed a few books somewhere in the late summer/ early fall and forward.

I read 28 of 30 books I was hoping to read this year. I remember setting the goal of 30 books last year and thinking that was doable. I was close! There were a few (maybe a lot) of DNF books too — too long-winded usually, or narrators/ protagonists I couldn’t spend the amount of time with I’d need to to get through the book. So these are just the *finished* books, not every one I cracked open.

What about 2017?

Well, I think I’ll try to read the same number of books and shoot for 30 again. But, I need to write more. A lot more, but instead of trying for a higher daily word count, I’m going to aim for consistency. I also need to hit *publish* on a few things. It looks more and more likely that I’ll be doing just that on my first non-fiction book very soon. Details to follow, of course. Until then, why not be my friend on Goodreads?

 

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