Hwaet!

Well, that was a year. Or, at least, that was apparently a year – I’ll be honest, it somehow felt like both an entire decade and barely three months at the same time.

Exactlty a year ago we rang in 2020 with a set of writing goals which, honestly, were predominantly 2019’s goals with a fresh coat of paint due to my having failed to complete most of them in 2019. So, how did I do in 2020? Let’s have a look:

REDUX

– finish the first full draft for Blood on the Snow. (Might actually make this, given we’re finally out of the damn alleyway scene we spent most of 2019 in [I’m not kidding. Due to life, work, and rewrites, I was on the same scene in October that I was on in January]). Done. Finally. 27 chapters, as of current writing, though rewrites might change that, and… an amount of words (it’s in too many documents for me to check that properly, but it’s a lot).

–  start the first proper draft for Silver in the Ashes. (Assuming we make the one above, this is pretty much a given, since even one new sentence counts for this). Done. Six chapters in as of today (01/01/2021) and starting in on the next chunk of the plot arc.

– win NaNoWriMo 2020. (Got to 38,000~ words this year with multiple LARP events and two weeks of horrific illness. We can do better than that this time around). DONE. No LARP, a week off, and pretty much sod-all else to do meant that we actually hit mark even with illness and work stress.

– actually get more done on Seventh Son. (My poor, poor project-on-hiatus. 2019 saw literally no work done on this, and it’s one of the things I’m actually a wee bit annoyed with myself for). Nope. Alas.

– write more poetry (because that’s something I can do that’s fairly low-pressure). Done. Only a couple of poems, but it still counts.

NEW

– Enter at least one contest (probably a Writer’s HQ one, because those for some reason feel a wee bit less daunting) DONE (and how!). Top ten finalist in the Dream Foundry Writers Contest, which I was not expecting and which I will absolutely take.

– Finish the Black Roses 100themes redo. Nope. Again, like Seventh Son, I need more of a creative runup for this one.

– Write more LARP fic. Nope. Mostly because there was barely any damn LARP, so that’s not so unexpected.

– Complete at least one Twitter hashtag game. Nope, but that’s okay.

So… overall, pretty damn decent. Turns out being stuck at home and desperately looking for distractions is good for something, at least.

Where do we go from there? Well…

2021 WRITING GOALS

– Upload two chapters a month on Argentum in Aqua for the entire year (barring a planned break between Blood on the Snow and Silver in the Ashes)

– Write, edit, and submit at least one new short story

– Make at least ten story submissions

– Add at least one chapter to Seventh Son

– Win NaNoWriMo 2021

– Write at least one new poem

Smaller set of goals this year, for two reasons. One: there’s still a sodding global pandemic (plus the entire Situation in the UK) and right now ‘exist, survive, do not have a mental breakdown’ is a wee bit more important than hitting arbitrary wordcounts and targets. Two: that first goal is… large. Especially since I’m slowly running out of backlog xD