I realized when posted my goals for January and the rest of 2015, I completely forgot to fess up on how I did in December. So…just for those keeping score, how’d I do?

• Clean my office.
• Finish another draft of Too Far Gone.
• Write something for the fun of it over my Christmas holidays (Not sure if this will be my superhero story for Tesseracts 19, or my sekkrit project for the Illuminaughty, or both).
• Maybe take a run at a couple of those yearly goals that can still feasibly be reached.

Hmm. I wrote a draft of my superhero story, and managed about 10000 words of my Illuminaughty novella. Made good progress on that last draft of Too Far Gone but didn’t quite get it done over my Christmas break. A couple of the chapters that were next in order were much rougher than I’d remembered them. The writing for fun was definitely necessary though. I felt a big recharge of the batteries as I created something new instead of fixing something old. As for cleaning the office…attempts were not even made. The state of organization in my office has degraded to the point that I didn’t think I could tackle it in a full day, and I never seemed to have two days in a row without something else requiring my attention. Maybe tidying can be a reward for handing in Too Far Gone?

Because:

It is done, and submitted to my publisher. And on that note: cue the music.

(Warning: Author may not appear exactly as pictured.) So, that’s one goal down, how’d I do on the rest?

• Finish Too Far Gone  (I have to, that’s my deadline)
• Turn in a review of Owl and the Japanese Circus for The Winnipeg Review
• Submit a story to Tesseracts Nineteen: Superhero Universe

Everything made it off the desk! That feels good, let me tell you. I tracked my fiction words every day in January using that fancy spread sheet I built inspired by Jamie Todd Rubin. I wrote every day in the month of January, totally 37151 words. Most of those words were rewrites in Too Far Gone, but I also noodled around on a novella and a short story when I needed a creative recharge. It’s still too early to do much analysis on the month, and I’m curious how the numbers will look when I’m primarily drafting and not revising. Author Jonathan Ball wrote a blog about tracking his writing that was interesting. I like the idea of tracking revised words/drafted words separately, and to separate out specific projects, as well as having a column for “other” writing, like blog posts and articles. I’d already started my tracking, so I thought I’d keep it consistent for 2015, but I might adopt elements of his plan in 2016. What’s the plan for February? In the spirit of actually attending to a couple of my yearly goals before November/December, specifically the short fiction ones here goes:

• Revise an old story to submit to Swords v. Cthulhu
• Finish revising a previously drafted story
• Draft a new short story.
• Clean my office

That’s all for now! Write on!