Another one of those, everyone is doing it, so should you things – the revision of the year behind us and the planning (including the obligatory New Year’s resolutions) for the year ahead. Ah, what the hell, I’ll bite.
The Dreaded 13
I’m not superstitious. I’m really not. But after 2013 I just, maybe just, have started to believe those suffering from Triskaidekaphobia are on to something. In many ways this year has been terrible – business wise, and with disaster after disaster coming left and right. Want some examples? My place in Poland got flooded twice in the same month.
But I’m not one to wallow in self-pity. So just to be contrary I will ignore all the negative things and focus on all the awesome stuff that happened last year. There had to be something, right?
The Engagement
Also since the ring was a tad too big, I’ve learned that adjusting the size takes a whole three weeks. I have a feeling they needed to melt the thing down and forge it all over given how long that takes… Though it was worth the wait.
Oh, and the holiday was lovely too. ;)
Although I started several projects not all of them have seen their deadlines met in 2013. Still, I published 3 books this year, including my longest published work: A Fool’s Embrace (Vampire Bytes) and two titles under a “special” pen name (yeah, naughty books are fun to write too…). Those three titles come to 38.5k words in total. Unfortunately I haven’t been running a writing total from the beginning of the year so not sure how much I actually wrote since the former number is what has been published.
I have a rough estimate for December 2013 – about 16k words of fiction and November 2013 – about 20k. Just need to get these things finished and published. I did complete a sci-fi short story for an anthology but since that won’t be released till a bit later this month (?) it will count for 2014 stats (I’ll publish it as standalone a bit after the anthology is out).
A Proper Grownup
Not sure if this should qualify as a pro or a con of this year, but I’ve moved from the young and spritely category to the old and boring over-thirty. Nah, life hasn’t really changed much. The big three zero hasn’t brought any life shattering revelations with it – mentally I’m still about fifteen…
Mastering Photoshop
This is one area I definitely made a lot of progress in. And not in the “yucky” use for web design. Still think those peeps are crazy and Fireworks is the best tool for that. Nope, I’ve been editing photos, mostly designing book covers. I’m quite proud of the things I’ve learned and how I went from mainly a single photo with minimal tweaks plus good typography, to more advanced photo manipulation. My portfolio has definitely grown a lot during 2013.
Resolution Time!
I still haven’t sat down to do an action plan for my business (and it desperately needs some focus). Want to have that done by the end of next week. Though that isn’t much of a resolution.
Have a game night once a week. It’s way to easy to just spend our free time watching stuff on tv and browsing articles on the web in the evening. Both my finace and I love board games, but seem to never have time to play these days. Will be working on that.
Write a blog post once a week. I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry seeing that the updates on this blog have been: 01/2013, a few sporadic ones and then 11/2013. It’s almost like I should move to Tumblr or something. I think part of the problem is the pressure of preferring one blog over another (I run several sites for different purposes). So the rule will be at least one either for DD or that I can link to from DD. That way I won’t feel guilty for posting on my author site (like this post about the Photoshoot).
Write 500k words of fiction. Well at least one of these goals has to be ambitious… Then again if I wrote five days a week it’s just under 2k per those writing days, so not unachievable if I’m disciplined about it. I love what DWS wrote about this specific topic in his recent post. I have to agree, that we should learn to take away what we can from failure and move on, rather than dwell on it.
Read 50 books. Nuff’ said. And I mean other than the ones I’ve written myself.
Finish this website. Erm, yeah, that’s long overdue…
I have quite a few things I’d like to achieve this year, but I think these are more goals and ongoing challenges. So I’m not going to vow to eat healthy or exercise just to fail by the time next holiday comes around. I’ve been working on that for a while, and however flawed my efforts have been they need to be more than a resolution. Besides in my case it’s starting to be a matter of not crashing after a high carb/sugar meal rather than dropping a dress size or two. Oh, all right, yeah that would be nice, too.