How did I do with meeting my goals this month? It looked okay at first, but if I stay at this pace throughout the year, I’ll miss my intended target by almost 48,000 words. I definitely need to up my game.
Writing
Managed to write 6 blogs posts this month, or down one from January 2016.
Word count isn’t bad. 34,466 for the month, or 4,072 over last January.
- Social Media: 19,932
- Email: 4,309
- School: 4,860
- Non-Fiction: 0
- Blog: 4,956
I don’t really have the numbers to compare to last year because I changed the way I’m counting. But my Non-Fiction category, which last year included social media and email, was just over 19,000. My blog writing was over 7,300 words last January vs. the 4,300 this year. But last year I was in the middle of promoting The Sad Girl, so I was writing more blog posts.
Reading
I read 4 books last month: Hope’s Peak; Unintended Consequences; The Debt Collector; and Cold Truth. Managed to squeeze in a beta read for a friend too, which got me hooked on his series. I’ll have to get to work on that soon. I’ll have a review post up later this week for those books.
I was looking for something else entirely the other day and came across Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun and Profit and Stephen King’s On Writing. I want to reread both of those this year, probably early in the summer. I know Block’s book seems way out of date, but my recollection is that he spends more time talking about craft and butt-in-chair stuff than he does the mechanics of the publishing industry. I read a #MondayBlogs post this week that talked about the importance of reading books on writing craft. I realized I haven’t read much on craft in quite a long time. I’m going through Writing Fiction for my short fiction class at school and taking in a couple of craft sessions at the OWFI Conference in May.
Goals
Looking at my goals for the year, I can cross #8 off. I’ve made my reservations for the OWFI conference in May. I’m really looking forward to it, especially the chance to meet Ben Montgomery. He did a stunning story on the brutality surrounding Florida’s Dozier School for Boys. That’s the kind of story I want to tell. There are so many sessions that I want to get to, I’m going to have a tough time choosing!
I’m also partway through #9. I’ve been asked to speak at the mini-con Writer’s Pad is holding in March at the Muskogee Public Library. Details will be on Facebook and my Appearances page here.
I’m starting to get excited about writing again.
How was your month?
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Image courtesy Pixabay user newsong, CC0 Public Domain
4 Comments
I missed most of my writing goals last month due to client work – paying work always has to come first! I’m still working out this month’s goals, but one thing I have been doing is blogging consistently this year, something I very nearly never do. But I’m trying! I don’t count social media and others in my word counts, maybe I should – forum posting alone would give me quite the word count! But I do count all the writing I do for my clients, and my journal and things like that, so I do pretty well. Hope you manage to make all your 2017 goals!
Thanks for stopping by!
I was finally able to start blogging consistently when I committed to doing #MondayBlogs. That’s been a huge booster for me. I think in 15 months or so, I’ve only missed about half a dozen weeks.
The main reason I started counting social media was to make a point to myself how much time I was wasting there, and it was a LOT! Granted, places like AW and Reddit have useful writing forums and advice, but the stuff I post on Facebook doesn’t help me write.
Best of luck to you!
Thanks so much for the link to my post on reading about writing craft!
My goals, such as they were, went fairly well last month. I aimed to blog twice each week, which I did, and keep editing my novel, which I also did. I find it pretty hard to measure progress in editing because I’m not working linearly or especially trying to add or subtract length at this stage, but I felt like I made good progress.
I haven’t been reading a whole heap of new fiction recently, so my goal for this month is to read four recently released fantasy novels. (Shameless plug: and if you subscribe to one of my mailing lists in Feb you can win one of them.)
It’s great to hear you’re feeling excited about writing again. 🙂
Hey, I love linking back to good stuff!
It’s an interesting feeling, getting excited again. I didn’t realize how hard of a hit the Booktrope closure was, but it really did throw me for a loop. I feel like I’m finally coming out of a fog of sorts. I think between my increased reading, and the writing the short fiction class is going to force me to do, I’m jump-starting the creative machinery.
Congrats on your goals! I completely agree on the editing. How do you measure that, other than something like chapters or pages covered? If you measure purely by wordcount, that can be very depressing!
Good luck for February!