Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Goals (Page 2 of 3)

2022 – Sad, Bad, and Good

December 8, 2022 /

My original thought for this looking back on 2022 blog was Good, Bad and Sad., but that means finishing on a low note, and overall that isn’t my intention for 2022. So let’s begin with the sad.

At the end of July, one of my best friends passed away. Chris had been battling cancer for many years, and seemed to have everything under control until the day after her son’s wedding, her heart decided otherwise. Through all her travails. I never saw Chris anything but upbeat and positive. Like everyone else who knew her, I will miss her smiles and infectious laughter.

Bad really falls into two categories. There’s life-bad and bad-to-good. On life-bad my writing fell off a cliff in July and really only picked up in November. Of course that totally derailed my writing goals for 2022 and has made me reconsider what’s really achievable each year. More on that when I look at 2023.

Bad-to-good covers my day-job world. In late September we signed a contract extension with our current client through the end of 2023. Just before Thanksgiving here in the US, the company decided we should be full-time employees or we were gone. I’ve been humbled by the number of people who suggested options when they knew I might be available in January, and now I have a contract that covers all of 2023, which is a good segue into the good part of 2022.

On the writing front, even though I won’t reach all my goals for 2022, I did publish five story collections and converted Thieves in the Temple to AI Audio as I mentioned previously.

Finally, at the beginning of this month (December), my daughter got married and I had the privilege of walking her down the aisle.

Overall a good year.

Finding Time

February 20, 2022 /

Back during my January First Thoughts, I talked about finding those extra minutes during the day to write beyond my normal writing time. As with so many things, it got filed into the “must do” folder, and was buried.

Until this past week.

February, to date, hasn’t felt as productive as January, so from the middle of last week, I paid more attention to what I was doing, how I was doing it, and looking for fifteen minute blocks of time that could be put to better use by writing..

Across the four days, I tracked four separate blocks of time on each day, where I could step away from the television, or put aside busy-work. That’s an additional hour a day. Using my lower level of writing consumable words – 600 per hour, and assuming we have about 300 days left in the year, that’s an additional 180,000 words. Say three full length novels, or 45 short stories.

So there’s no excuse in trying to say I have no time to write!

Thoughts on January

February 3, 2022 /

I think my first thought yesterday was where did January go? It seems like five minutes ago we were celebrating the New Year, and now here we are in February.

On the writing front I finished six short stories, and submitted three. The others are destined for collections I’m working on. The seventh should have been finished on Monday, but a quick trip out for pizza ended up being much longer than planned for many reasons not relevant here.

January did end up being the most words I’ve written in the month since I began tracking my word count, so many positives there, and a good foundation for February.

As a follow up from my last post, Quiller Balalaika arrived today, and I immediately dived into the first chapter as soon as it was unwrapped.

I’m about 1,500 words from the end of that seventh story, so I’m off to finish it, with the reward of Quiller when I’m done. It could be a late night!

First Thoughts on 2022

January 11, 2022 /

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.

2022 Is Here

January 2, 2022 /

Well, the world made it into 2022. Not that there’s any doubt the planet would make it. As to humanity, we made it as well, with the hopes this year will be better than 2021. Travel still seems to be the lottery I mentioned last time, and I decided to hold off any decisions to see what governments did after January 1st. At the time of writing they’ve done nothing so in the next week or so, I’ll get onto the airline sites and see what they have available.

I have decided to go with the tripling my annual count of usable words. That’s usable fiction, non-fiction, and this blog. For anyone counting that’s going to be about 500,000 words for 2022. It’s a long way from the two-million plus Dean Wesley-Smith is targeting, but maybe I’ll go for that next year, or in 2024. Assuming I make it, that will be ten or more items toward that magical twenty number I talked about in early-December.

As of today, I’m about 1,500 words behind. I’m not worried about it because yesterday was spent in a lot of preparation and establishing my 2022 tracking items. Today I made a start on a short story, and have a hard copy of Death at a Wedding beside me. I’ll look through that hard copy to remind myself where I was, and get my head back into ancient Babylon. I’m not working with the day job for the next week, so I expect to make good progress.

I’m also planning to write here more regularly in 2022, so stay tuned and I’ll report on progress next week.

First Thoughts on 2022

December 16, 2021 /

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 Again

December 6, 2021 /

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.

April Recap

April 26, 2021 /

I know we’re not quite at the end of April, but it seemed a good idea to put this together as I started some of my planning for May.

This week sees the publication of my second collection – A Frailty of Heroes, and I’ve worked out an efficient way to generate the covers etc. for paperbacks, so both Tales From the Puzzle Store, and A Frailty of Heroes will be out in paperback quite soon.

And Promise in the Gold, the anthology containing my story Searching for Dave is scheduled for release on May 4th.

It’s been a quiet writing month, but I did come across a note taking app called
Obsidian

I downloaded Obsidian just to look at, and after dabbling with it for an hour or so, browsed the forums. There’s quite an extensive section with discussions on knowledge management and Zettelkasten in particular. I’ve not mentioned Zettelkasten on this blog before. It’s a knowledge management system that’s intrigued me for some time but I’ve never quite grasped the concept.

I do now!

The phrasing in one of the articles just connected with the way my mind works and it all came together. I’ve got less than a hundred notes in the repository but I’m already seeing the potential. It’s certainly worth a look.

Now into May, and the next collection!

December and 2020 Recap

January 5, 2021 /

I hope everyone made it safely through the holiday season and into 2021. 

I usually use the period between Christmas and New Year to think about the past year and develop goals and plans for what I want to achieve in the following year.

When I look back at 2020, I completed twenty short stories and didn’t get to the additional three novels I wanted to publish. However, I did get Thieves in the Temple completed and published wide, and I have a lot more confidence in my ability to format and publish eBooks wide. Paperbacks are a different issue as there’s much more to the cover design, so that has to be a 2021 challenge. 

I did make a start to the second Jacob novel, Death at a Wedding, and I’m just under ten percent of the way through it. I don’t know who the murderer is yet, but in the first two chapters there are enough suspects to keep Jacob busy. I have a timeline for when I want Death to be published, and I’ll let you know when, if, I make it.

The publishing challenge is coming along slowly. Including Thieves, there were two pieces published in December (fifty to go). I have several short stories ready to be uploaded, but I need to write the sales copy for them. I’ve learned it’s best to do several at a time so you get into the rhythm. That’s how I completed six or seven of the Jacob stories. I just need to put some time aside to write the copy and find appropriate cover images.

The plan for 2021 is just about there, and I’ll share the highlights in the next post. 

November Recap

December 15, 2020 /

November could easily be a cut-and-paste from the October recap because most of it was spent on the edits to Thieves in the Temple, which went on sale on Amazon, Kobo, Apple etc., on December 5th. 

I added a couple of chapters, and combined a couple more and by the time I finished the last read through, I think I could probably read the story aloud from memory.

One of the most valuable tools during this editing exercise, apart from the inevitable editorial red pen has been the application Pro-Writing Aid. It does a much better job of spell-checking than Word, and also flags the correct spellings in the wrong context – form instead of from – that sort of thing.

Most importantly for me though is the long term block I have when it comes to using commas. No matter how much I study the rules and correct application, they still appear in the wrong place. Pro-Writing Aid is excellent for catching those mistakes. A word to the wise, though. Word has a different view on the correct application of commas, and will “argue” with the changes you make in Pro-Writing Aid.

November finished up with a lot of thought about what comes after Thieves in the Temple. If you’ve browsed the rest of this site, you’ll have an idea :). The next novel is Death at a Wedding, and that will be followed by Murder of a Dead Man. 

I’ll keep you posted on progress

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Richard Freeborn

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑