Starting Over

So, it's January first again -- a new beginning. To a lot of writers, it's a time to heave a sigh of relief and reset your counters to zero. That's exactly what I'm doing, and it feels pretty good.

One or two of you might've noticed I stopped updating my wordcount counter several months ago. My writing crashed, and I never got it back, despite trying a few times. My real 2014 wordcount is a few thousand greater than my counter was showing yesterday, but not enough to sweat over. I made a little over 200K words last year, when my goal was 300K. That's a pretty huge failure.

Back in 2012, my year-end total was a little over 80K words. I considered that to be a huge failure too. And coming into the last month and the last week of the year, I felt about the same in 2012 as I felt in 2014 -- depressed at failing, and eager for a new start. The difference this year is that my horrible, huge failure in 2014 produced about 2.5 times as many words as my horrible, huge failure in 2012. That's a pretty great failure, if you think about it.

Aim high, miss high.

I have a goal of 300K new words of fiction again for 2015. Hopefully I'll make it this time. With luck, I'll pass it. But even if I fail, so long as the failure is up in the six digits, I'll have done a decent chunk of writing. I'm good with that.

I finished eleven stories in 2014, and no novels. I'm going to shoot for a goal of an even dozen shorts and at least one novel in 2015.

I have stories coming out in four anthologies this year. I'll finally have a significant (relatively [cough]) number of publications on the SF/F side, and that'll be cool. I'd like to have at least as many next year, but that's just a wish; I can't force someone to publish one of my stories, so all I can do is keep writing and submitting. Putting myself into a position where editors and publishers can decide to accept my work is all I can do on the tradpub side.

I also want to indie pub at least six short stories this year. It's not a lot, but I've been wanting to get into the indie side for a while now. It's time to take some action, so those six indie shorts are a goal. If I can do more, great.

I'll be starting up the Anthology Market posts again this month. I apologize for going on hiatus for December; I should've announced that. I've noticed that a lot of publishers take a vacation in December too, though, and a lot of writers back off to do holiday things. Hopefully we didn't miss much, and everyone's ready to dive back into the pool this month.

I started a new blog for Angela Penrose, my SF/F writer persona, at http://angelapenrosewriter.blogspot.com/. It's meant to be a resource point for readers, rather than a place for writers to chat. The Anthology Market posts are not cross-posted over there, and I'm keeping that blog very low traffic. That's where I'm talking about new SF/F releases, and similar things readers might be interested in. I'll probably mention major milestones here as well, but I wanted an uncluttered place where a reader could find my work without having to take a machete to a lot of writer talk and general blathering.

[Yes, I have a Gmail account for that name. I don't check it very often. If you need to get ahold of me, angiepen at gmail dot com is still the best general address, or angiebenedetti at gmail dot com if it's for something romance-specific.]

I had a decent holiday, with some ups and downs. I got a lot of books for Christmas, which is always a good thing. :) I hope everyone else had a great holiday too, and is ready to get back to work.

Angie