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.

I’ll admit straightaway that 2021 was a tough year for me on the writing front. Politics, the pandemic, the insurrection, the ongoing disasters due to climate change and our inability to address it — it all saps my creative energy and distracts my focus. It hasn’t helped knowing my 2020 novel Pacific Storm, published just over a year ago, failed to catch on despite positive reader feedback. At this point, it’s earned less than $5,000 over production costs — and given that I put a year of work into it, that’s discouraging.** And when I get discouraged, it’s hard to write. Even writing this post has taken absurdly long! 🙄

So yeah, this was a tough year, though not entirely unsuccessful. Here are the specifics on how I did, with the goals I set for myself in January in all-caps:

1. WRITE AND FINISH A NEW NOVEL
I’m writing it, but I did not finish it. This is book 3 of the Inverted Frontier series. I’m well into it, and I think it’s a strong draft, so far. I am disappointed it’s not a complete draft.

2. PUBLISH THE WILD TRILOGY
Done! The Wild is an older epic-fantasy novel that I revised extensively in 2020, and then divided into three short novels. All three volumes were published last spring. I love these novels and I feel like I’ve finally done right by this story.

3. WRITE ONE SHORT STORY (OR NOVELLA)
Doubly done!
A few years ago I resolved to take a long break from writing short fiction to focus on novel writing. But this year I wanted to write one short story to include in my third short fiction collection. Instead I wrote two stories on commission. “Ride” has already been published. The second story is still with the editor, but should see publication in 2022.

4. PUBLISH A THIRD SHORT-FICTION COLLECTION
Maybe next year…
The downside of writing two commissioned stories is that I still need to write another story or two to round out the new collection — but that task will have to wait until after I finish the novel.

I’ll be posting my 2022 goals on January 1. I suspect that list will look a lot like this list. 😉

**In hindsight, I should have delayed publication until early 2021, and invested more time and money in advance promotion. A costly lesson.

Posted on: Monday, December 20th, 2021 at 5:15 am
Categories: Annual Writing Goals.