So? How was your creative 2018?

Well, here’s how it felt.

Here’s what I ACTUALLY crossed off the list:

• Finish drafting and revising Graveyard Mind 2
• Finish drafting An Excuse for Whiskey
• Keep my short fiction on submission
• Systematic finishing of the short stories I’ve started writing but not finished. I would like to get at least six new stories out the door this year
• Separating my IP from a work-for-hire project that didn’t pan out
• Finish a draft of a secret project me and a buddy are collaborating on
• Finish two comic scripts

Stretch Goals

• Start writing a new book

Honestly, this is better than I expected 2018 to have turned out to be. i only drafted about 60000 words, down to nearly a third of what I’d done the last two years and even worse when compared to 2015.

I didn’t get much further on Graveyard Mind 2. Edits and then touring Graveyard Mind took up more energy than I expected. But! Me and Sandra Wickham made a big push at the end of the year and finished the first draft of An Excuse for Whiskey (We really need to find a title for that bloody book!) and that secret project which I still can’t talk about.

Keeping my short fiction on submission didn’t take a lot of energy as I only had a couple short stories that haven’t been trunked still in search of homes, and two of those sold! Which means of course, if I want to keep my short fiction on submission in 2019, I really need to finish some more of it. As to that, 2018 wasn’t great for finishing stories. I jumped around a lot between stories, making progress on several but not quite finishing any of them. A couple of those shorts have grown into novellas, which is relatively new territory for me, but that’s the length they want to be. We’ll see if that’s the length they need to be when I’m done with the drafting. I did a bit of work outlining one of the comic scripts I wanted to write, and while I know the page beats I want to hit, the actual script is far from finished. I didn’t start a second script.

Separating the IP from the work-for-hire project fared the worst. I made next to no progress. It’s one of the things I know needs to be done, but it sometimes feels like throwing good time after bad, when I spent most of 2017 on a novel that won’t (and can’t) see the light of day until this task is done, when every desire spurs me to just write the next damned thing.

What is the next damn thing? I guess I’ve started it, in that I’ve been doing a bunch of world building. There’s a few exploratory bits of writing that’ve happened as I’ve wondered who the protagonist is going to be. There’s even a map! But I’m holding off on writing too much actual prose until Graveyard Mind 2 is in the bag.

So, what’s up for 2019?

• Finish drafting and revising Graveyard Mind 2
• Revise An Excuse for Whiskey
• Systematic finishing of the short stories I’ve started writing but not finished. I would like to get at least six new stories out the door this year
• Separating my IP from a work-for-hire project that didn’t pan out.
• Be ready to write that new book by November for NaNoWriMo
• Read more

That’s gotta be plenty.