rowyn

My goals for 2013 were ... *checks*:

Keep score: This meant "track what I've done in accordance with my fiddly scoring system." I did this. The spreadsheet wasn't updated daily, but I never let it go so long that I couldn't reconstruct my results. I think this is the best I've ever done since I started tracking. I am pretty sure this is directly because I was working steadily on A Rational Arrangement. Nothing makes me want to record my progress like knowing there's been a meaningful amount of it.

Score 30,000 points. This was my super-ambitious goal, because I only scored 27,000 points last year. How'd I do? 45,780. Yes, I scored over 150% of my goal. 20,000 of that was from finishing a gargantuan novel. But even if I hadn't finished RA, I would've been close to my goal, which amazes me.

The first draft of A Rational Arrangement weighs in at a whopping 209,464 words. All of which was written between Jan 20 and Dec 30 of this year. This also stuns me. It means I wrote an average of 608 words per day -- a bit over 2 pages -- every day, including weekends, just on this book.

RA was the big accomplishment of the year, but it wasn't the only fiction I wrote -- I also did some Flight Rising fanfic, worked on an unfinished story from the Tarot card prompts, and wrote a not-quite-finished prequel novella with two of the RA protagonists. Collectively, including world-building notes for RA, it works out to about 240,000 words.

On the illustration front: almost a complete absence of activity at all. I did sketches of the three RA protagonists and that was pretty much it for the year. For someone who is more-or-less capable of drawing, I do incredibly little of it.

On the blogging front: I did more blogging than drawing this year, but still not as much as in years past. I had a goal of getting 2/3rds of my points from fiction, and the actual was over 9/10ths. This was ... too little blogging, in fact. I didn't mean to quit writing about my life and thoughts, and in the last three months I've written five posts. Yikes.

Write more fiction: Goal: OVERACHIEVED. I can dial back on this one next year. Well, maybe not on "writing more fiction" but certainly on writing more relative to my blogging.

Post the occasional status update: My target was four. I did two. Oops. Perhaps going into "write all the time" mode dampens my enthusiasm for writing-about-writing. Anyway, the purpose of the status updates was to keep me on track, and since I crushed my goals with great crushiness, two posts was obviously sufficient to the task. Mission accomplished!


tl;dr version:

Started and finished the first draft of a book in a single year!

Wrote more than twice as much fiction as last year!

Exceeded my target by 50%!

Conclusion: TOTAL VICTORY. \o/

This afternoon, I went back through my blog so I could to update my activity log to include the journal entries I've been making here as well as the fiction (which I've been more prompt about tracking, since I've done a lot more of it.)

I've been thinking "Wow, I've been doing a great job at my goals this year, because my goals is 50 points a day and my average is now at almost 70. For four full months!"

Then today I looked at my actual 2013 goals instead of what I thought they were.

Oh. Right. I changed them from 2012. Instead of a daily 50 points, I have an annual 30,000.

...

That would be 82 points per day. Oops.

Now, this isn't the "ZOMG so far behind!" that it looks like, because the whole "points" system for this year is heavily dependent on finishing things. I am well on-course to finish A Rational Arrangement this year, and assuming I actually do so, that'll put me easily over 30,000 for the year. But it does remind me that if I lose steam on this project before finishing it, I am going to need to do some serious finishing-stories work or I am not going to make goal.

The vast majority of my writing for the year so far has been A Rational Arrangement or the prequel short story that goes with it, "His Angel". (Oh hey, I could finish the prequel short for a completion bonus too. It is much closer to being done. Huh.) The novel is about 55k words as of this writing (and looking likely to come in at over 100k, sigh, though I am still hoping for under 120k.) The prequel is at 9200 words.

For my blog, I've written about 21k in various entries and posted, um, a bunch. 54 entries or so, I think. Many of them being book reviews or the short "Good Things" entries.

Anyway, there were four parts to this year's goal, so in order:

Keep score Been doing this! I have been measuring by words written rather than time spent almost exclusively this year, because the time-spent measure requires my time to be focused and while I have been getting stuff done, I have been doing it in dribs and drabs amidst various distractions. That is explicitly okay. The goal is to get things done and be reasonably happy while doing so. Process is not that important as long as those criteria are met.

Score 30,000 Points: I am at 8,665 as of today. I am anticipating I will get another 4k+ points in writing on RA and then around 21k in completion bonuses for finishing it. So I am considering myself provisionally "on track", although this does require the all-important "finishing it" step actually happening.

Write more fiction: The target was 2/3rds points from fiction. I am actually at a hair over 3/4ths. Even without yet qualifying for any of the big completion bonuses. Well hey. Cool.

Post the occasional update: I forgot about this. I was aiming for 4 total, and this is the first one. Still. Status updated now! Goals actually looked at so I remember what they are instead of what I thought they were.

The 2013 goal sheet has a provision for revising it, but I'm happy with it for now.