Anyways, how was your 2014? Did it feel kinda short? Like if you blinked too much you would've missed the whole damn year? Certainly did to me. Time is definitely speeding up, isn't it? I'm sure science has proved that.
Now here we are in 2015 and I still haven't found a cohesive and consistent format for this blog, so for the moment it will continue to be sporadically updated about nothing in particular. And for now, here's a run-down of what I think I achieved in 2014:
My main resolution was to write every day. Previously, I've set myself the target of one thousand words per day... which sometimes I hit and sometimes I didn't. The problem was, on days when I wasn't hitting my target then I'd feel bad, and there were conspicuous weeks when I didn't write anything at all.
So I set a new goal: write every day. Doesn't matter if it's a thousand words, two thousand, fifty, or just a few scrawled words in my notebook. On one day I wrote two hundred illegible scribbles (I may have been drinking). On another, the only thing I wrote down was, "he'd been dead so long that when they picked him up his face stayed on the carpet (true story)", which I found written in biro on my leg when I came home from a hard day at the pub.
I also kept a spreadsheet of my daily-weekly-monthly totals, because I'm sad like that. In 2014, I wrote a total of 295,670 words (not all new stuff - some was editing or rewriting, which got an approximate word-count assigned to it). My most productive month was November, unsurprisingly, when I clocked 54,562 words for NaNoWriMo. Least productive was February with 10,177. Most words in one day was 3,039. On average I wrote 24,639 words per month, 5,685 words per week, 810 words per day.
That last stat was a pleasant surprise. Apparently, once I gave up my determination to set down 1,000 words every day and instead concentrated on writing however much I felt like, I actually became more productive, and in the end didn't fall too far short of that arbitrary 1,000 wpd target.
I finished one novel in 2014 (a crime story I didn't really intend to write until I started), completed two-thirds of another (women's fiction, another genre I'm currently blundering into), I blogged and posted crits for my writer's group, I wrote synopses and outlines and a few poems, and scripted half a graphic novel about gangster-flowers. I also read 42 books (not as many as I'd hoped).
So there we go, a bit of bragging and a small ego-boost, and now at least I know where all those moments in 2014 went.
This year... well, this year I intend to keep trying to write every day, since it seems to be working for me. My new resolution is that drawing counts as writing, and any time I spend drawing can be given a word-count-equivalency, because I need to get back to drawing.
Happy 2015 to you all. :)
