2019 Review/2020 Goals

[todisturbtheuniverse]

I decided that a review of last year's writing progress, and even setting goals for 2020, didn't really belong over on tumblr anymore, but I hope to use this space going forward as a sort of writing log. I started doing that last year, and liked it, until life just went absolutely haywire and I got off track.

Before I even thought about my goals for this year, I needed to revisit the goals I set for 2019 and how they served. At the end of 2019 I set these goals, and the results were hit or miss:

1. Write, brainstorm, or edit a little bit every day. The spirit of this one is good, but the reality is that I should really adjust my expectations. It would be great if I really could do this every day, even if some days are only two minutes of work, but if I only have time for two minutes, I'm apt to really need those two minutes to, say, lay down on the couch and just breathe for a bit. But! I count it as a victory that I did writing-related activities on 276 days in 2019. I tracked my actual time pretty closely, too, and spent about 331 hours on those 276 days on writing, editing, brainstorming, and the like. That's about an hour and twelve minutes of work on each one of those 276 days. I'm damn proud of that.
2. Learn some different editing techniques, and practice them. We're going to return to this one down below, but in short, did I do more actual functional editing than I've ever done before? Yes. Was it particularly organized, the way I envisioned it? No. Partial success.
3. Remember to do your fun writing when you need it. This was not successful, though I don't blame myself. I had my hands so full that even when I had the ideas or inspiration to just play around, writing fanfiction or short drabbles or anything, I was too burned out on the activity of writing to follow through; I needed to just sit down with a good book instead, or some other activity. I did write a few fics when I was really, deeply inspired to do so, and when it was the only thing I wanted to do with my time, so very partial success.

I also set a few more project-specific goals:

1. Ready F/F contemporary romance novel proposal materials for submission to a specific publisher by the time they have another open proposal call. "This is not going to go the way you think," ominous old man Luke warns my past self, but alas, she cannot hear Jedi Masters in galaxies far, far away. Basically, I set this goal thinking I was going to have until about May, based on this publisher's historical patterns. Instead, they opened their annual pitch event (separate from open proposal calls but not something I wanted to miss) in early February, with a due date in early March. I still did it! But it was...challenging. I was also wrapping up everything for my wedding at the end of March, and work was exploding, and life was hard. But I got it submitted. And that's worth something.
2. Complete the next draft of the supernatural-adjacent, fantasy novella project. I didn't manage this one; in fact, I didn't even look at this project in 2019. But there was good reason for that; see #4 below.
3. Focus on quality over quantity. I did a good job with this particular goal. My hope was to get away from my love of throwing spaghetti at the wall; I loved just sitting down and churning out words and not caring whether they were particularly good or refined (they mostly weren't the first, and were never the second). I wanted to work on actual editing/revising, not redrafting, which I'd done with another project for five years, telling nearly a new story every time I completed another draft. And I did! I still wrote a lot of words (328,427, to be precise), but less than previous years, and most of those words were in service to first drafting, then refining a single story.
4. Ready F/F contemporary romance novel for submission. I ended up tacking this goal on in mid-April, when the publisher mentioned in #1 reached out to me and requested a full manuscript. I had high hopes for how fast I could get this done. I had the first four chapters, which they'd seen and I couldn't change; I had a synopsis, which they'd also seen and I couldn't change; how hard could it be to write a first draft (a thing I've historically done in two or three weeks when pressed), then revise and polish? I set a lofty goal of getting this done by mid-July, and I missed the mark by a mile. In fairness, I had never really committed to editing and polishing any original fiction before. The editing and revising process has always looked so overwhelming to me. First drafts are easy. No one has to see them. Internal inconsistencies can be cleaned up later. I had never gotten to "later" before, and it kind of kicked my ass. But I made it through, thanks in no small part to my writers' group and their dedicated feedback, and I turned the project in mid-November. This marks the first time I've submitted a novel anywhere since I was thirteen and pluckily idealistic about how great I was. It's been an eye-opening fifteen years since, but here I finally am...and now we continue to wait to see what they say.

Overall, 2019 was one of the hardest years of my life--creatively, professionally, and personally. It felt like everything that could go sideways did, spectacularly. But it has to have been one of the most rewarding years ever, too. I got married! I was promoted at my day job! I put a friggin novel on an editor's desk and they are presumably looking at it with their eyeballs!

So now I have to look forward, at 2020, and figure out what I want to do next.

1. Complete the next draft of the supernatural/paranormal-adjacent, fantasy novella project. Since I didn't get to this last year, and I want to carry forward the practice of revision and editing, this will probably be my focus this year. It has the potential of getting shelved again, IF *fingers crossed* *knock on wood* *whisper* the publisher says yes to my other project, and a heretofore unknown-to-me process involving further rounds of edits and preparation for publication gets underway...but I have to work on something else, at the very least during the long waiting times, and this is the project on my list that's closest to being complete and sent out.
2. Writing and writing-related activities on no less than 240 days this year. This reflects my 2020 GYWO goal, a Journeyman-level Habit Pledge, the same as I undertook last year, because frankly the next level up is just not something I can try. I know I'd fall short, and it would bum me out. But this particular pledge level is good for me: reinforces the quality-over-quantity thing, keeps me away from the word count goals that are my siren song, and corresponds to a good level of work throughout the year.
3. "Fun writing," in whatever form it takes--and other activities that refill the creative well. More than likely, this will be taken up in large part by my prep for the Pathfinder campaign I'm back to running. But I miss posting fic, too, so when inspiration strikes, I want to seize it. However...the reality is that, sometimes, I'll have done so much other writing that "fun" writing is not fun anymore. In those cases, it's okay to do something else to refill the creative well. Read a book. Go for a walk. Play a video game. Watch a movie or TV show. All fine! Sometimes that's what the brain needs.

I'm hopeful about this year, and I like these goals. I think they're useful and obtainable. Major life events are out of the way for now (witness me knocking on wood AGAIN, because the truth is we are very casually house-hunting and who knows what could happen), and work is calmer (*knocking intensifies*), so I'm hoping for less stress and more chill overall.