Holy (BLEEP)!
Soooo, another year is behind us and as everyone does, it’s time to look back and assess the situation. Overall, 2022 gets a solid B grade. There were things I blew out of the water and some things I need to focus on in the coming year.
First the upside. All of my words to paper goals were met and then some. Yay, me! I proposed to finish three novels and I turned out four. I set a goal of writing my first short story and I wrote four of those as well. My daily routine of writing has become ingrained, and I can usually crank out over a thousand words every day on my lunch hour at work. On my days off I can get as many words on the page as I have in my head. Sometimes I just hit my daily goal of one thousand and other days it just pours out with several thousand appearing on the page. My goal for last year was 300,000 words and I totally crushed that shit coming in at over 450,000. So, box checked on productivity!
Now the downside. While I did submit a couple of my short stories to publishers and sent off a manuscript to another, my querying is a weak spot. To seriously sit down and submit novels to agents and publishers is such a grind that I have avoided it, for the most part, in favor of writing. Love writing… hate querying! The sad truth is, if I don’t get an agent or a publisher interested in my stuff, I’m just entertaining myself and the beta readers. Put aside all the artsy fartsy idealism of writing and the ultimate goal is to get paid for all the hard work and even though I can put words to page like nobody’s business, it’s still hard work. We have discussed my desire to get traditionally published and the fact I’m putting off the self-publishing thing as long as I can. Hell, any monkey with a computer can self-publish. The loads and loads of terrible books on Amazon and Kindle prove that every day. Call me old school, call me antiquated, but that’s how I look at it. Just because everyone can do something, doesn’t mean everyone should.
So, I am declaring 2023 the “Year of the Query” overlapped by the “Year of the Edit”. Yes, that’s right. Editing! Or as I like to call it… slow words. The molasses of writing. Of my six completed novels, I have only edited one of them using my new method of combining the Pro Writing Aid program and having Word read it back to me. At the same time addressing continuity issues and the notes my beta readers have given for each book. The same can be said for the short stories, having only edited two of the four.
My process for the last year was to get my thousand words in at lunch and then do some editing when I got home. Obviously, that didn’t work as far as getting the polishing done. The that end, I am going to reverse it, trying to edit first and reward myself with the fun part later. We’ll see if it works. So far, it’s going pretty well and in the first week of the year I edited about a third of one of my older novels. A new short story has also been completed that is the origin story of a character in one of the books I plan to write this year. Think old west supernatural bounty hunter. The short story is called “High Midnight” with the novel tentatively titled “Hex Slinger”.
That’s where everything stands and I haven’t changed my output goals for the coming year even though I killed them last year. My goals are not easy by any stretch of the imagination, so I would rather keep my production where it is rather than up the quota and not hit them. This is supposed to be fun and failing repeatedly will take the air right out of your sails. Anyway, that’s all I have for now, except to tease the next blog… the rabbit hole that is AI art programs for book covers!
Don’t forget to check out the rest of the web site for updates on projects, what I’m reading at the moment and other such nonsense. Also drop me a line if you would like to be one of my beta readers (The Eyeballers). I have several and will probably only take a couple more. For demographics sake, I am looking for a couple of older readers, say in the middle age range. You know, some old farts like me!
Happy New Year everybody!