2019 in Review and 2020 Goals
Published
January: Frost and Desire
July: The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince
December: "Insecurity" (novelette for The Reclamation Project )
Edited
The Princess, Her Dragon, and Their Prince: complete
The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium: novelette, complete
The Twilight Etherium: completed first-round edits, needs a second round
"Insecurity": short story, complete
Written
The Twilight Etherium (draft started 2018, finish January 2019. Total length 102,900): 28,500. Draft complete, partially edited.
Spark of Desire: 91,200
The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: 48,900
"Insecurity": 8000 words
That's a total of 176,500 words, almost half of last year's total word count. Meh. On the upside, it's still 2.5 books completed.
Art
I did more sketching than usual this year, which is still "not much sketching". I also did a handful of nice fan art pieces and one ridiculous illustration of Frost in lingerie.
Support Lut
He's still alive! And doing reasonably well, although still too fatigued to do much activity on any given day.
General Adulting
On the home maintenance front, I continue to be a failure.
I got a quote on what it would cost to repair the garage and realized that having a garage is not worth that price to me. It's not even worth 25% of that price. Like, I might pay 25% of that just to not have a broken garage, but the truth is all the garage is to me is a place to store the bike I don't own anymore, and even if it were fixed I'm not sure I trust it enough to keep a bike there again. Even if I got another bike. Which I haven't really wanted to do. A lot of why I loved having a bike was because it's good transportation if you don't have a car. I have a car.
Home maintenance aside, I have done Excellent Adulting, including things like getting myself to the doctor for general wellness visit for the first time in many years, and twice-annual dental visits, and managing Lut's care and our insurance and renewing my driver's license and car registration and all that other adulty stuff.
2019 Goal Recap:
* Support Lut through cancer treatment process: Done!
* Do something about the broken garage wall: Nooope.
* Publish three books: Nope. Published two.
* Finish drafting three books: Nope. Finished two. Did finish a couple of short works, tho.
* Write a book in the 55,000-85,000 word range and which covers the entire original outline for the book: Nooooope. Spark was just 6,200 words over it, granted, but tbh I'd forgotten this one was on here until like October or something, and by then I didn't care.
* Post monthly updates: Done!
2020 Goals
~ Continue caregiving for Lut
~ Publish two books
~ Publish The Mortal Prince and the Moon Etherium
~ Finish drafting two books
~ Do enough maintenance on house to keep it from falling down around us
~ Make one color picture every month
~ Continue to track food & exercise
~ Post monthly updates. Check goal list when I post them.
Stretch goals:
~ Write a book in the 55,000-80,000 word range which covers the entire outline for the book
I failed on most of my 2019 goals and I don't feel like doing that again, so I'm just going to aim lower. Yes, I have published three books in a year in the past and I am sure I could publish three books in a year again. But I'm unconvinced that there's any real merit in pushing myself to do so. My revenue per year has been in the low 4 digits since I started publishing books, with 2015 remaining my best year for net income. Even if my net income from writing was ten times higher, my 20-hour-a-week job at the bank would still pay better. The likelihood that someday I will make enough money at writing for it to replace my day job is slim, and those odds are very little impacted by whether I write 2 books a year or 3.
So. It's enough if I only write 176,000 words in a year. Or if I only write 100,000, for that matter. It's plenty.
I put art back on the goal list because I got to do a "year in art" thing back in 2015 and I want to be able to do that again. This entry was originally posted at https://rowyn.dreamwidth.org/645297.html. Please comment there using OpenID.