Good riddance 2018 and hello 2019

Fond Farewell, by Edmund Blair Leighton
DM16545 The Fond Farewell by Leighton, Edmund Blair (1853-1922) Messum’s, London, UK English, out of copyright

To be fair, heaps of good things happened in 2018. For one thing, I finally began to recover from the polymyalgia rheumatica, and I discovered a few food allergies that restricted my diet still further, but got rid of my sinusitis, my hives, and my migraines.

For another, I published stuff: novellas in three multi-author box sets plus two novels. I wrote another novella that will be published next month, at least six newsletter subscriber short stories, most of the rest of the co-authored book Mari Christie and I are publishing on Wattpad, and a third of another novel.

My personal romantic hero and I had an absolutely fabulous holiday with Carol Roddy (aka Caroline Warfield) and her beloved, and built some wonderful memories.

And I spent another year with my best friend, culminating in our 47th wedding anniversary just after Christmas.

On the other hand, for most of the year I was just hanging in there.
Family crises, the busiest year at work ever, illness, and all sorts of other hiccups meant I finished the year with less done than I’d planned, and a good case of exhaustion.

I’m back at work on Monday 7th, after two and a half weeks off. For the first nine days, I slept ten hours a night, and then had a two hour nap each day. It’s nice not to be tired, and I’ve come back to a three-day week at the day job.

I’ve upped my expectations for writing in 2019 to allow for two things.

First, I have that extra two days a week — counting travelling time, that adds up to an extra 18 hours for stuff that isn’t the day job.

Second, my personal romantic hero gave me Dragon, the dictation software, for Christmas. I’ve been using it less than a week, and I’m already achieving a slightly higher word count dictating stories than typing them. As I get more skilled, I hope to at least double my writing speed.

So here’s the publishing plan for 2019. Two long and at least four short novels; at least two novellas; six subscriber-only short stories; a collection of my published New-Zealand-based stories.

Given the extra time, it’s feasible, but of course it could change on a dime, since family and friends come first.

Still, if I want the mountain top, I need to aim at the stars. Roll on 2019.

No looking back, no promises

Okay, I can learn from past errors. Last year’s letter to 2017 had exactly the opposite effect I intended. Instead of responding to my pep talk and improving over 2016, 2017 managed to exceed 2016’s ill effects in every way. Let’s not even go there.

Instead, let’s look forward. Here are my wishes for the coming year.

On a personal note, I hope 2017 will bring good health to me and mine. Above all, I pray for health, happiness, and peace within my family.

I look forward to the opportunity this year, as I untangle and resolve a mass of health issues, to spend more time with friends and less time just completing the next item on my daily lists.

But I love those lists. Thanks to them, in the worst year I have ever experienced, I’ve still kept up with the day job, published one novel and almost written another, published two lunch-time read collections and two other novellas, one new, and had novellas in three co-authored boxed sets. I haven’t done much else, but I have done that.

My target for 2018 is ten thousand words a week on a first draft of something. That’s around ten hours original writing a week, which is feasible. In 2017, I managed around half that. (Did I mention it has not been my favourite year of all time?)  But with better health and less stress, I’m hopeful I can do the ten thousand words, which will split out something like this:

  • the last 12,500 needed to finish The Realm of Silence
  • 60,000 for House of Thorns, a marriage of inconvenience story
  • five original anthology stories of between 15,000 and 20,000 words each for four different groups of authors
  • 40,000 to 50,000 more words to expand The Bluestocking and the Barbarian into a full-length novel
  • 80,000 for Concealed in Shadow, the sequel to Revealed in Mist
  • 80,000 for Unkept Promises, the fourth Golden Redepenning novel, which tells Mia’s story
  • 30,000 in subscriber-only newsletter stories, one every two months.

So that’s just under 400,000 words, leaving me a little in the tank for another project I have in mind, and for the things that steal time from beleaguered authors, such as selling the house we’re in, since we want to downsize before the end of the year.

I’m not going to say that’s the plan. Far be it from me to make an actual plan! And it certainly isn’t a promise. But it’s feasible, isn’t it? Bring on 2018, I say.