Every January I put up a blog post listing my writing goals for the coming year. At the end of the year, I check back to see how I did. That assessment is the subject of this post. Since 2018 turned out to be a disastrous year for meeting deadlines, I decided to go easy on myself in 2019, and as a result I met all my goals!

Here are the specifics, with the goals I set for myself in January in all-caps:

1. PUBLISH THE NEWLY FINISHED NOVEL
This, of course, was Edges, and it was published as planned, on April 2.

2. FINISH THE SEQUEL to the novel in #1
I had only 70,000 words of Silver at this time last year. I put the final polish on this 125,000-word novel in early November.

3. PUBLISH THE SEQUEL
Silver was rushed to publication on November 19, a day I saw as the last viable date to publish before the holidays took over the attention of potential readers. On the downside, it had almost no advance publicity. On the upside, a lot of you have already read it. 😉

4. START A NEW NOVEL
I’m working on a detailed outline of a near-future thriller. For me, that definitely counts as a solid start.

I also had a few goals for the publishing side of the business. I wanted to get a nice book cover done for a two-novel omnibus edition of the Puzzle Land books. I really like those crazy stories and would love to see them get more attention — but I’m still looking for the right artist for the project. My other fantasy novel, The Wild, is presently unpublished. I had hoped to complete a read-through & polish, and then re-publish it, but it was never a priority in a busy year, so maybe in 2020.

I’ll be posting my 2020 goals on January 1. Talk to you then!

Posted on: Monday, December 30th, 2019 at 5:00 am
Categories: Annual Writing Goals.