A lot of cool things happened while I was prepping for conventions, getting sick and trying to finish Graveyard Mind edits in the late stages of 2017 and early 2018. Among those cool things: Kevin Madison did a phenomenal version of my Thunder Road character, Tilda, youngest of the Norns.
Love it! Thanks, Kev!
Well 2017 was certainly something.
Now…what did I hope to accomplish for 2017?
Stretch Goals for 2017:
How’d I do?
Not only was 2017 a bad year for achieving goals, it was also a bad year for writing about them. Somewhere along the line, I gave up on posting about my monthly goals (even this post is late! I got sick end of 2017, and then novel edits dropped right after New Year’s). Largely, because not much was happening for me on the writing front. I spent way too much energy following U.S. politics, which was something I was probably not alone in doing.
Novel work definitely took most of the brunt of this inaction. I didn’t write, revise, and submit a new novel in 2017. I think I only managed to add one chapter to An Excuse for Whiskey. I got about three chapters into revisions on an old novel manuscript before deciding to trunk it (at least for now). I pursued NaNoWriMo only because of how few words I’d produced in 2017, and I hoped the mutual energy of the event would give me a kick in the ass to start typing again–and it did! I knocked out a little more than 50000 words of a followup to the forthcoming Graveyard Mind. This sequel was not the book I’d planned on writing, but then, Graveyard Mind had been a NaNoWriMo book too, and it’d also displaced the one I’d planned on writing, so it was sort of fitting its sequel would do the same.
Short fiction fared the best in 2017. I kept my unsold short stories out on submission for the first half of the year, until they either sold, or I’d expended their potential markets. 2017 was also my best year for short fiction sales, with four stories sold! One of those I was convinced I would have to trunk despite it garnering a couple personalized rejections along the way, so that was a nice surprise. Two stories sold (Eating of the Tree and Midnight Man versus Frankie Flame) were among my stories that’d been started and not finished previously, both of which I finally got back to when a likely anthology for them opened to submissions. The final sale, to Equus, “Scatter the Foals to the Wind,” I wrote new in November 2016 and sold early in 2017. I also self-published two new Thunder Road stories in a short collection, Wolf and Wing, bringing my new stories finished in 2017 to four. Not bad, despite not making my goal.
I wrote one six page comic script, which is mostly polished, and outlined two more. Hopefully they will see the light of day this year. There’s at least one more script I’ve been noodling on, we’ll see what happens with that one.
Here’s what I want to do in 2018:
Stretch Goals
And January specifically:
And since I spent most of January fixing Graveyard Mind, here’s my goals for February:
Chadwick Ginther 