I find it helpful to set goals for myself at the beginning of each year and then look back and assess them at the end of the year. It provides a bit of a roadmap, almost, for the year and I check back on it every few months to remind myself what January Rhonda wanted the year to look like. Sometimes things change between Januarys but either way it’s a handy tool that has helped me manage my magpie energy a wee bit 🙂
Now we’re at the ‘looking back’ and evaluating how I did part of the process.
The original goal post that I made is right here –> Goals for 2021 in case you should want to see all the details because I’m only going to share the Coles Notes versions here LOL
Looking Back at 2021
My #1 focus for this year is going to be to increase the amount of writing I do.
I feel like I did this. The challenge specific to this goal was the proportion of time I spent editing vs. writing and that shifted just enough, I think. I took on a lot fewer editing jobs short term and long, so setting myself up for more writing time than editing in the coming year as well. I think I’ve got a good balance going on right now between these two things that I love 🙂
Revising Depth Year & The Year of Finishing Things
Funny story. Or perhaps it’s actually just an example of why it’s helpful to me to write these goals down and check them regularly. Because this started out well and then fell all to shit because I totally forgot I was doing it.
Good grief, right?
So the idea was that I was going to finish one thing a month and also for every thing I brought into the house I was going to re-home or otherwise remove two others. It started out great, the first couple months this was front of mind and I was consciously thinking like, ‘What am I going to finish now?’ and not bringing more stuff into the house than went out of the house. But then somewhere around August I came back here to look over my goals and see how I was doing and was like, “What? I’m doing… oh man. The year year of finishing things! I totally forgot!”
It totally fell off my radar. I cannot even begin to explain how completely I forgot it was even a thing I was doing. So. I did not accomplish this one, that’s for sure.
Book Releases
I had a lot of books come out this year. At the beginning of the year I thought it was going to be seven but in the end it was “only” six. Holy man, please note the quotes around the word only because I promise you putting out six books is too many. But I did it. This year I released:
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- Clockwork, Curses and Coal
- Arcana
- Water: Selkies, Sirens and Sea Monsters
- Dark Waters
- G is for Ghosts
- One in the Hand
One in the Hand was also in a boxed set… but that’s pretty different because the marketing and promotion is totally different. Depending on how you count book releases though, that may or may not count.
When I was looking ahead at this I absolutely recognised that this was going to be the biggest challenge of the year and it was. By the end of the year I wasn’t burned out but was definitely a bit crispy around the edges. But I did it.
Patreon
My goal, in short, was “I will keep on top of my responsibilities to my Patrons, including providing them with exclusive fiction every month.” And I did that. Not only did I do that, but I actually added another tier that means I’m creating two pieces of exclusive fiction a month.
I should write a post about how amazing my Patreon has been. It’s definitely been one of the crutches I have leaned on during this pandemic. But yes. I am super stoked to say that I nailed this goal 🙂
Writing
The goal was “I would like to write 100k words of new fiction this year. By ‘new fiction’ I mean first drafts of something. Ideally I would also like to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year, but if I get to 100k without NaNo that’s great too.”
Totes nailed it. I wrote 119,938 words of new fiction this year which includes 52k words that I wrote as a part of NaNoWriMo.
I also edited 655,051 words this year LOL That includes freelance work, the work I did for anthologies and my own work. You might look at those numbers and think, “Wow, Rhonda, I thought you said you were writing more this year or something?” but the thing is, editing is so much faster than writing. So much.
I used Writer-Bot in my Discord channel to track all my writing and editing this year, which was also wonderful. I’ve tried using spreadsheets and stuff before but it’s always fallen off my radar because it was just one more thing to do every day, but Discord is different because I have it up all the time anyway. And people say ‘Yay!’ when I update it. So, like, win/win 🙂
Reading
My goal was to read 45 books this year. According to Goodreads I actually read 60.
There’s something that I think is worth mentioning here — I really struggled to read, like, physical books. And ebooks, with the exception of stuff I was reading for work, was right out. I think it was a reflection of pandemic brain, but whatever the reason, the vast majority of my reading was done via audiobooks.
MVP
I wanted to set this up by the end of the year but I’ve actually decided to shelf it.
How to Anthology
I’d also intended to finish this series of posts on my Patreon, but interest was actually low (as were my available spoons) so I shelfed it as well.
Funding
I wanted to research some funding options for an anthology I’d like to do at some point in the next couple years. But after extensive consideration I’ve decided instead to pursue a more traditional publication route for this project and will be putting some effort into that in the coming months.
Clean Up Twitter
I meant to block off some time to go through every single account I follow individually and see if I wanted to keep doing that. But I totally didn’t.
However, Twitter’s algorithm changes mean I may not be staying there much longer anyway? So maybe it’s okay that I skipped this because it may have ended up being wasted effort. We’ll see.
Submissions
I had expected to have two open submission windows and wanted to send out initial responses within a month of receiving submissions to them. I’m not sure if I hit that one month mark? If I didn’t, I was close. My response times were definitely nothing to be ashamed of. And also I ended up having three open submission windows rather than two. So, like, bonus!
Prepping for the Future
I wanted to set out the timeline for the next Alphabet Anthology (H) and figure out the release schedule for Untethered. In the end, I’ve decided to put the Alphabet Anthologies on hold for a little while — I’m sort of flirting with burnout and also trying to spend more time writing and less editing so this seemed like a prudent course of action in the short term. I do have the release details for Untethered sorted, however. It will be coming out in March.
Body Movement
My goal had been a minimum of twenty minutes of physical activity every day. And I started out pretty well but by November was not hitting even that minimum goal most days. And December? Well, that was even worse. I’m back on the horse again now, though, so we’ll see what 2022 has in store for me in this regard. I would really like to get back to being in shape and enjoying exercise but so far I haven’t put the effort in that I need to make that happen. I should work on that.
Conventions
I ‘attended’ several virtual conventions (which are one of the few silver linings of this pandemic). I hadn’t intended to put any pressure on myself in regard to attending conventions so these are all gravy.
Giftmas
My goal was to successfully run another fundraiser for the Edmonton Food Bank, and I did that. Our goal was $1,200 and we raised $1,320 🙂
Bonus Points
I wanted to write up the Aphanasian 5e campaign I’m working on and playtest it with one of my D&D groups. I did not do that LOL I started to do the write up but it’s still very, very far from being ready for playtesting.
Overall, I’m good. Honestly, I feel like just making it through this year with my sanity (relatively) intact is a victory and every single thing on top of that is a victory. So, while there are a few goals that I fell short of, I’m still really pleased with how I did overall.
I feel like I ought to provide some details about some of my highlights for the year and such rather than just sort of addressing all my goals, but this post is already quite long LOL So I’m going to close it here. Maybe one of my goals for 2022 should be a more detailed ‘Looking Back’ post LOL
