My Writing Year in
Review.
Okay,
I am into stats, so here’s a few writing numbers for 2012.
·
Last
year I wrote, at least according to my daily word counts, 117,649 words, which
is an average of 321 words a day.
·
I
wrote on every day of the year, so my output on many days was very little.
·
I
wrote and submitted ten articles to the DiVine website of which nine were posted
on the site.
·
I
blogged at least once a week.
·
The
novel I am writing grew to 166,000 words.
·
I
critiqued/edited a non-fiction book and critiqued a couple of short stories.
Not
that impressive.
My Writing Aspirations
for 2013.
This
year is going to be one of primarily editing/rewriting. I plan to write and edit every day and:
·
Finish
the novel I am writing. I still
reckon there are another 10,000 to 20,000 words to go.
·
Edit/rewrite
Stalking Tigers, a novel I was halfway through the second draft of when I got
distracted by a beaut idea for a novella. Once Stalking Tigers is rewritten I
will get it critiqued.
·
Edit/rewrite
that 17,000 word novella and get it critiqued.
·
And
then come back to the current novel and edit/rewrite it and find some really
good friends who like really long novels to critique it.
·
And
towards the end of the year I hope to begin a new novel in National Novel
Writing Month.
·
I
will continue to blog once a week at least.
·
I
hope to critique a lot more, some longer short stories, maybe a novel.
·
I
want to fix up my website and get a stronger presence on Twitter so I don’t
have to rely on the ever changing Facebook to promote myself.
·
You
may have noticed I left out Divine. It is in a state of flux at the moment and
I am waiting to see what form it takes this year.
Changes to Facebook
I
only recently learnt that Facebook has changed who sees status updates. The
updates are now not sent to all friends, just those selected by a Facebook algorithm.
This was done by Facebook in the hope that we will pay them to promote our
status updates. I am not sure how this affects my author page. I don’t know
whether my author page members all receive my blog and Divine article notifications.
The
Facebook changes make it clear that I would be a fool to rely on Facebook to
promote myself and my writing. So this year I plan to use Twitter more frequently
and hopefully effectively as well as Google plus. The same goes for my website,
which I need to revamp. I also plan to run my blog on both Blogger and
Wordpress to see which gets more hits.
Not
an overly ambitious year, but hopefully it is one where I act like I want to be
a successful writer.
5 comments:
Good luck with all that, Graham. If it comes off, you'll have two finished novels by the end of the year. You didn't say anything about finding a publisher, or agent, or self-publishing them. Maybe that's for 2014 :-)
Yep Graham, trying to get them published will be next years goal.
Wow Graham - that is amazing. That's two novels worth! Congrats on the achievement.
I too find Facebook to be dwindling in terms of generating interest. Too many people doing the same thing and as you say, some ppl can't even see you anymore.
As for getting published, well, as you know, I've been trying for years now and aside from the novella, have had no luck. It's fickle and frankly, pathetic. No one will even give you a look in. You may have more luck but I'm certain you will discover the frustrations that come with it.
Congratulations on a brilliant year.
Have you played with Google Plus much? I'm experimenting. I like the Communities feature, but at this point I don't have enough friends on G+ to make much difference in my traffic. Definitely agree about the Facebook algorithm, though--it's transparently mercenary, and I have a feeling it's going to lose them a lot of users.
Hi Katherine
I'm have just started to really play with Google Plus. I also really like the communities - I am getting a lot of information about writing and science fiction from the communities I joined. Probably spending more time on Google plus than Facebook now. I just have to convince more of my Facebook friends to join Google plus.
Graham
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