2013 My Year In Fic

2013 Fiction Word Count

Progress Bar from Writertopia

I wrote a lot this year, but I'm not sure how many projects I actually finished. But given that word count, I'm upping the amount I want to write to 140,000 for 2014. Edit: And then I never finished this post and never published it, so you're getting it now.

Stories I Finished:

Signs and Portents: Meanwhile in Gotham City finished writing and posted. It's a nice stopping point for this series as I try to figure out what I'm doing with Man of Steel.

The Dark Knight Rises: Weapon of the Shadows was finished, but I'm still working on cleaning it up for posting.

The Atsejhkigom language for Zy's Universe. It gave the Perfect Girl headaches, so it's only right to note that here even if it's background work that doesn't count as a story.

Stories I Didn't Finish:

Strix: Forget the Sun: 2013 derailed my plans to finish the first draft. It's waiting for me to pick it back up.

Part of the Night: The One Rule is responsible for derailing 2013, but I've learned some valuable lessons writing it.

My favorite story this year: Weapon of Shadows, it was supposed to be a short story and then it ballooned into a novella.

Story most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: Strix: Forget the Sun because it couldn't even hold my attention long enough to finish it.

Most fun story: Part of the Night: The One Rule because I don't think I've ever fixed so much canon in one story before.

Stories I wrote that I never thought I'd write: Part of the Night: The One Rule because I broke my cardinal rule about posting while writing the story. Consequently, I found out there was a reason I gave myself that rule in the first place.

Hardest story to write:

Biggest disappointment:

Biggest surprise:

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would, less, or about what you predicted?

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

Did you meet last year's goals?

• Short and sweet: indie-publish an ebook. I don't know if it will be Stellar Gift of Death or Strix: Forget the Sun that I've started writing, but that is the one official goal for 2013. -- Yeah, that didn't happen. Neither original story reached a state of publication.
• Unofficially, I have lots of projects to finish, but I don't want to put any pressure on myself that will make Perfect Girl flip out and ignore all of it. And I keep accumulating fun writing time as reward for getting chores done that I don't use. I need to build using it into my schedule somewhere. -- I wrote 137,979 words so I found the time in my day.

Do you have any goals for the coming year? Writing including Blog posts: I shunted off the original work again, despite having a productive word count. That's okay, I'll pick it up for 2014. Blog posts I wrote and typed and never posted (as you can see by the post-dated post I've been posting today). I can post daily--see Discipline Under Fire--so I don't think posting every week is an impossible task. So Tuesdays will be my blogging day and I'll compose in Blogger's editing window, so I won't gather typed posts that I don't post.

Three writing projects at once is too many. I never should have let the Muse team up with the Perfect Girl who thinks everything must be done as soon as I think of doing it. However, bouncing between two projects hits the sweet spot. Rather than concentrate on meeting a word count--even though I will track it--I'm making a list of what I want to work on for 2014.

• First draft of Strix: Forget the Sun
• Second draft of Stellar Gift of Death
• Post TDKR: Weapon of Shadows
• Post Part of the Night: the Wayne Legacy
• Rough draft of the next story in Signs and Portents