Category: Publishing (Page 1 of 2)

When I began jotting my thoughts down for 2023, one of the things that struck me was how similar the list was for 2022, and that made me pause.

A lot of the personal items were house maintenance projects, like replacing air-conditioning units. In 2022, they fell into the “nice to get to” category. For 2023, they’ve mostly moved into the “need to schedule” category.

From a writing perspective, that took a little more thought. As I mentioned my word count fell off a cliff in July and derailed my goals. There was also another factor in that the initial plan was to write mostly long fiction – more Jacob and Miriam stories, and a trilogy I’ve had rolling around in my head for a long time. Instead, I got distracted into short fiction, and short fiction I found hard. With the benefits of hindsight, I should have reviewed everything in the middle of the year, and reset. Easy to make these decision after the event.

Those thoughts coalesced around the same time I was reading some of Mark McGuinness’s work on being a 21st Century Creative, where he talks about a project focus rather than something more granular. The more I read, it became obvious I’ve let myself become too focused on the number of words written instead of the end product – a short story, novella, or novel. In 2023, I’m going to shift the emphasis. The writing plan, including keeping a more regular schedule with this blog, is to complete six projects in 2023. I’ll still track word count, and if I succeed, it will be about double the actual words for this year, and end up about 60% of what I planned for 2022.

And the projects? I know the first one, and have already made a start. There are placeholders for the rest, but they aren’t cast in stone.

I’ll let you know how it goes , and in the meantime, I hope everyone has a safe and prosperous New Year.

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.