- wrote 38K new words (plus Feb/March, which I didn't record)
- did 53 skill-building sessions (roughly one per week; better than I thought I'd done)
- finished one novel revision and
- sent that manuscript to beta readers (and read and took notes on all feedback)
- read 21 books, 15 of them novels (though novel analysis was more miss-than-hit)
- did 110 critiques (two novels) as part of my participation in two crit groups
- submitted short stories five times
- wrote four blog posts
- took three writing classes (WTO, RW, and NKH ss class*)
- went to one writing conference
- hosted a writing retreat.
Huh.
New word count is really, really low (I usually top 100K but I didn't do NaNoWrimo this year and I didn't track any of the manuscript rewriting as "new words") and I really need to submit more. But ... maybe I don't totally suck.
Really, that's the reason I do an insane level of hashmarks and spend part of every day recording time spent on activities that I'll never be paid for -- to remind myself that I'm not twiddling my thumbs eating bonbons every day. Because next week I won't have any idea how I spent today; next month I won't remember this blog post; by the end of the year I won't remember whether I spent the entire month writing or shoveling snow or reading incendiary anti-Trump rants on Twitter. (For the record, I did spend some time doing the latter).
But I'll *assume* I wasted my time and accomplished nothing in every case, because that's how I'm wired. If I don't write it down I forget it, and if I don't write it down or check what I wrote down I beat myself up for not getting anything done. Of that list above, all I remembered without looking at my records was I'd read a few books, finished the novel revision (hard to forget that milestone, yay!) and took a class. Oh yeah, and that retreat. And I did a blog post in there somewhere, and was that other class this year or last -- maybe I should check?
Keeping track keeps me from burning myself in effigy for incompetence and uselessness Every. Damn. Year. As a depressive person to begin with it's a worthy enough cause that I keep it up.
This month, I'm experimenting with bullet journaling, because it's essentially what I've been doing, only ORGANIZED. (Organized is good. Hell, organized is the holy grail. I'd post a picture of my box-and-paper-piled office to show you why, but I'd never recover from the shame).
I use People System's uncalendar and I love, love, love it. I keep mine in a big high-school zipup binder and call it my Brain and if I lost it, I'd cry for a very long time.
Uncalendar's clunky website (they seem to be unwilling to post images of their pages anymore)
It's an incredibly flexible and integrated (as much as you want it to be) system and I've been using it for decades. It's already a diary/planner/organizer/taskmanager/journal in one place, which is the cool thing about a bullet journal. I use the monthly pages to track what I did every day and keep track of my goals.
But as I've done more and more with the uncalendar over the years, I hadn't figured out how to organize the pieces, so I was wasting a lot of time flipping through finding the right pages. Just the concept of adding an INDEX -- yeah, yeah, I know -- was a light bulb moment for me. My index was in my highly scattered frontal cortex, but having an actual page is... helpful, okay?
And the idea of doing fun arty things to leaven what has become crammed pages of solid text just cheered me up. I added a bookcase drawing for my book list, for example, and tore out an adult coloring book page to illustrate my "rewards" page (because I'm not much of a skilled doodler but I like the idea of breaking up all those lines of text with fun and colorful images).
If you're not familiar with bullet journaling go visit these pages and some of the links:
or
and you'll see what I mean by arty journals and designs-incorporated-into-goals-and-tracking. AWESOME but a little beyond me for starters. It took me half a day to draw a bookcase page I liked. LOL.
But I'm already way beyond some of what they're doing for *tracking* (daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal tasks and goals) and I want to keep that because maintaining it gives me a good continuity of comparison. Some of what's not working, though, I could shift to their visual system-- it could be faster and less repetitive. Just need to experiment a bit.
2017's writing goals will be similar.
2017's writing goals will be similar.
- Need to finish the beta manuscript SOON and send it out to agents (I'll give it a year of submission, and then if no-one bites I'll self-publish, I think).
- I'd like to read more books this year *and pay more attention* to what made them tick.
- I'd like to write more fresh fiction but I'm discovering as I get better I have less tolerance for what feels like "junk/crap" stories with no point (but I don't know if it can be more than junk until I finish it enough that it can be revised, now do I?) More skill-building sessions--writing just to practice--might help me get past that.
- Submit more short stories! I have nearly 100 short stories. I should have more than one sale. I can't sell if I don't submit!
How was your year? What are you planning on for 2017?
*Writing the Other (Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford)
Revolutionary Writing (Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due
Joy of Short Story Writing (Nina Kiriki Hoffman)
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