Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 11 of 14)

We’re just over a week into the year, and so far it’s a bit of a mixed bag. In terms of word count, I’m several thousand words below target for the tenth of the month. From a production perspective, I’ve completed two short stories, and have a third in flight.

If I’m going to hit the rest of my targets for January, I need to increase my word count, and two things happened this past week that were like a bat over the head. I mentioned Dean Wes’y Smith’s writing challenge last time. What I didn’t mention is the planning he did to set himself up for success.

Dean spent time in December tracking how he spent his time, and where he could find the hours for writing. The blog is here – My 2022 Challenge. In parallel, I listened to one of Joanna Penn’s podcasts, and she talked about the same thing – tracking your hours and finding time for writing.

And then it hit me.

I’ve listened to both these writers, and others, say much the same thing. I’ve never set myself up to track my time, and wondered why I couldn’t “find” extra minutes to write. I’ll let you know how the tracking goes this week, along with, potentially, two new short stories.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks thinking about writing, publishing, and cash streams during 2022. On the day job front we’ve been fortunate enough to have our contracts extended – in one case all the way to the end of 2022.

A lot of the planning has circled back to my previous thinking about what to write next year. Not so much what to write – I have more ideas than I know what to do with at the moment. It’s which bright shiny object gets priority until it’s finished.

To get close to what I’m thinking, the annual word count I mentioned last time needs to triple or quadruple. it’s not so much making it happen, but making it happen in the time I have available and factoring in day-to-day events and the travel we have planned.

Travel outside of the US looks to be trending toward a lottery again. As I write this, the infection counts are rising once more, both here in the US, and in England, so it’s coming back to the same questions I had earlier this year. Do I book and risk a lockdown and travel restrictions, or do I hold off?

Or flip a coin and go with that answer.

It’s that time of year when we start to look back at the last twelve months, and begin focusing on the next twelve. The line from year to the next, is really an arbitrary one. There’s nothing to say we couldn’t start the reflection in June and implement in July each year. For those of us in the United States, it also aligns with the end of the tax year.

Looking back at 2021, my three main goals were to write more than 300,000 words, renew my project management certification, and publish 52 pieces of IP.

As of early December, my guess is the word count for the year will be just over 150,000 – slightly up on 2020 but not where I wanted it to be. Renewing my project management certification was essential for my day job. I ran it a little too close to the October deadline for my own comfort, but I did make it, and now have to start planning for renewal in 2024, which will be here before we know it.

At the beginning of 2021, I was about two thirds of the way through the Short Story Challenge of writing a story a week for a year. My thought was to take those stories and publish them individually, thus getting to the 52.

Separately, I learned a lot this year about publishing and what it takes to really achieve discoverability. Apart from publishing wide, the consensus seems to be, you need to look at having twenty or more major items available. Major items consist of novels, novellas, or collections. Individual short stories don’t count, so that led me to a slight rethink on the publishing approach for 2021, with the result I published five short story collections this year.

Reaching or getting close to the “magical” twenty number has driven a lot of my thinking around plans for 2022. As of early December 2021, there are fourteen more to go.

I’ll let you know how the planning progresses.