rowyn

I normally do separate December wrap-up and year-in-review posts, but I'm combining them because I only have a couple of things to comment on for December specifically.

Health/Fitness
I''m 181 lbs now, which I mention for bookkeeping purposes.

I've been trying to get back into the habit of exercising again, with not much success. I wonder if I can get a reclining exercise bike that would work with a laptop yet? The one I got 10 or 12 years ago is almost but not quite workable with one. Lately a lot of my exercise has been dancing in my living room, with the laptop on a counter top, which is probably not as good exercise as the treadmill desks some people use, but it's better than nothing.

My favorite exercise guru answer to the "What is the best kind of exercise?" question is "The kind you will do."

Writing
Fellwater: 38,041. (Fellwater is at 91,141 total now)
PollRPG: 29,023
Demon's Lure: 80,966
Demon's Sigil: 73,284

That's 221,000 words of fiction total. That's a lot less than last year, when I wrote 347,300. But 2016 Me only edited one book and 2017 Me edited three. The only other year where I've broken 200,000 words was 2013. So, all together, I'm pleased with how much fiction I wrote.

Of those projects, only Demon's Lure is a complete book. I hope to finish Demon's Sigil in January. I estimate I have around 20,000 words left. Most of the hard stuff is done and it's mostly denouement from here. Then it's All The Edits because the Demon books were ones where I kind of skipped some of the world building and character development that I really should've done beforehand and now I need to backfill it. *sigh*

Anyway, I finished drafting a book! So that was good.

I don't know if I will finish Fellwater or Poll RPG, for different reasons. I'm not quite declaring them dead, but they're both dormant. Haven't decided what I'll write after I finish Demon's Sigil. I have several candidates. All of which are sequels of a sort, for a change. None of them involve existing characters, but they do involve existing settings, at least.

The Business of Writing
I finished edits on three books:
Silver Scales
Golden Coils
The Sun Etherium

I published two of those, Silver Scales and The Sun Etherium. Golden Coils will come out later this month.

Art/Other
Uhhhh. I did a cover for The Sun Etherium? And a few incidental illustrations for books. I pretty much gave up on trying to draw in 2017, to be honest. Getting a Surface to draw on did not help in any meaningful way, alas.

Happiness
This is the year my partner of twenty years was diagnosed with cancer and spent eight weeks in a hospital, mostly in a state of confusion so strong he couldn't remember anything but his name and mine.

So all things considered, my mood was pretty good. But 2017 was still a crappy year.

Goals Recap

Let's look at last year's goals! I set some.

Serialize Silver Scales (aka The Warlock, the Hare and the Dragon).
-- Nope, didn't do this one. But this was a "decided against" rather than a failure. When I polled about this, only three people responded that they preferred serials over reading it as a book. Serializing a book, even one I've already written, is a significant time investment and didn't seem worth it for three people. (My apologies to all three of you!) A Rational Arrangement had picked up a number of readers as a serial, but The Moon Etherium didn't, so I figured the serial was unlikely to grow my audience.

Publish Silver Scales
Done! In November, so later than anticipated. Mostly because cancer. -_-

Publish the sequel, Golden Coils, probably sometime in September-December
Not quite! It'll be out this month.

Hire a professional-quality artist to do cover illustrations for the above.
Done!

Stretch goals:
Publish The Sun Etherium, probably in December.
Done! On time, even.
For those curious: I bumped TSE ahead of Coils because when The Moon Etherium was in the Story Bundle back in September, Alinsa and I added "Coming Soon" blurbs for Scales (in October) and The Sun Etherium (in December) to the back. Scales ran a little late because it was long and had some layout issues. Since I hadn't set a release date for Coils and I had set one for TSE, I wanted TSE to make its release date.

Also a bunch of people kept saying "why are you releasing the sequel so soon after the first book? No one will have finished it yet! Traditional publishing never does that!" Well, traditional publishing never does that for a bunch of reasons that are irrelevant to me. But I figured the extra month would make those people happier. O:)

Finish drafting a new book or three.
I finished drafting Demon's Lure! I am almost done with its sequel, Demon's Sigil. I expect to finish that this month. They will need a fair bit of editing.

Also, keep doing the monthly updates. Those are handy and not too arduous.
Done!

I had some December-specific goals too:

Illustrate The Sun Etherium cover:
Done!

Look for an artist for Demon's Lure.
I figured out what I wanted the cover to look like partway through the month, and realized I definitely could not do it by doing a bad mockup for it. Then I emailed an artist at 10:30PM on Sunday night just so I could write that I hadn't failed this one. The artist got back to me the next day with a "sure, I can do this" and a quite reasonable quote. I still have to get him a contract to sign, but it looks like I have a cover artist. \o/

Talk to my father and/or Telnar for advice about my horrible cash flow issues.
I did talk to Telnar, and then my cash flow issues got resolved by unrelated means. ♥ and also \o/

Write 14,000 words of Demon's Sigil.
Wrote 20,000 words SO THERE December!

Conclusion
I technically failed two goals this year (serializing Scales and publishing Coils). But I achieved all the rest, plus some stretch goals, and Coils is super-close to being published as well.

Overall, I am SUPER PROUD of myself for everything I accomplished. While doing all of this horrible adulting. GO ME. I can't believe I actually achieved stretch goals in this terrible year. What.

\o/

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

canis_lupus03

You are awesome! :-) You've certainly accomplished much in a very difficult year. (Seriously. 2017 sucked for so many people, for so many reasons...) I'm happy for you! :-)