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Year-end creative roundup: 2009
Time for my annual year-end creative roundup post. First, let me check my progress against last year's goals! Then, I'll be back in a new post with this year's goals.
I started last year flying high, and then got knocked down, first by work -- I wasn't planning on having to go back to work full-time, let alone full-time plus freelance out the wazoo -- and then I went back to UAF full-time to finish my degree, at which point my creative output basically plummeted to zero. Still, I'm not too unhappy with what I actually managed to accomplish.
So, seeing how last year's goals stack up against my actual progress...
Draw Kismet short comics - update twice weekly, all year or until I run out of ideas.
No, not really. I stalled out in March or April, when work really started hitting me, and I realized I couldn't do this and Sun-Cutter too.
Work more on "Sun-Cutter". I also wrote: "I don't plan to begin updating Sun-Cutter until I have a good, solid backlog of pages, and I want to do a nice job on the art, so I'm not even committing myself to starting updates by year's end."
I wish I'd stuck to that last part. I really jumped the gun on starting Sun-Cutter; the result was that I had to put it on hold with only 15 pages on the website.
Focus my short-story-writing efforts on specific markets: pick a magazine or zine, and write a story specifically to submit to it (which of course can be shopped around other places if it fails to sell to that one).
Um, this actually worked. I'm still kind of stunned that it worked, but it did. I sold three short stories this year, and finished a few more that are awaiting revisions. Not every one was written for a particular magazine or anthology, but a lot of them were, and simply the process of looking around and seeing who's buying short fiction, and then writing short fiction with their target audience and word counts in mind, is going a tremendous way towards getting me past my tendency to wander off in the middle of a story and never finish it. It also helped a lot that short projects were easier to pick up and put down than big projects, but simply being able to narrow down my goals and deadlines to very specific targets seemed to be the thing that made the big difference. I will definitely be doing this again next year!
Finish another novel, either one of the partial ones or a new one.
Nope. Work + school pretty much killed my ability to stick with a big project (which is why Sun-Cutter eventually went on hiatus, too). I worked actively on two novels during the year, but neither one of them is in very good shape.
Revise the sci-fi-Western novella.
Nope.
Write 1000 words or do 1 page of comics per day, every day that I'm not working at my day job.
Since I've been keeping pretty detailed records all year of what I've written, I actually can check my results here. *checks* Looks like 20 out of 52 weeks last year I made my goals. Which seems kind of dismal, except that nearly all of the missed weeks are in the last half of the year, when things kind of went to hell as far as being able to carve out creative time.
Make progress on the Kismet: Hunter's Moon and Freebird print editions.
Yes! Things are actually moving along at a pretty good clip on the Freebird book; I plan to spend a lot of time over the break working on new strips for it, and there's a vague chance it might be out in 2010. More likely 2011, though. It's still definitely on the front burner. And I've at least been thinking about the Hunter's Moon book, if not actually working on it actively.
I'm actually feeling pretty good about the past year. Here's my short list of what I did in 2009:
- Recorded daily writing totals (I actually started this in mid-2008, but this is the first year I've done it from the beginning of the year and been conscientious about it).
- Wrote ~117,000 words of original fiction; finished several short stories; worked on two novels.
- Finished several Kismet short comics.
- Started Sun-Cutter; then had to put it on hiatus.
- Quit work; went back to school.
- Sold three short stories - Hetsie's Wonders and two stories which will appear in very small-circulation anthologies coming out next year. I'm not precisely taking the world by storm, but I'm pretty damn psyched about this.
- Made solid progress towards publishing the print edition of Freebird.
Back shortly with my 2010 goals!
I started last year flying high, and then got knocked down, first by work -- I wasn't planning on having to go back to work full-time, let alone full-time plus freelance out the wazoo -- and then I went back to UAF full-time to finish my degree, at which point my creative output basically plummeted to zero. Still, I'm not too unhappy with what I actually managed to accomplish.
So, seeing how last year's goals stack up against my actual progress...
Draw Kismet short comics - update twice weekly, all year or until I run out of ideas.
No, not really. I stalled out in March or April, when work really started hitting me, and I realized I couldn't do this and Sun-Cutter too.
Work more on "Sun-Cutter". I also wrote: "I don't plan to begin updating Sun-Cutter until I have a good, solid backlog of pages, and I want to do a nice job on the art, so I'm not even committing myself to starting updates by year's end."
I wish I'd stuck to that last part. I really jumped the gun on starting Sun-Cutter; the result was that I had to put it on hold with only 15 pages on the website.
Focus my short-story-writing efforts on specific markets: pick a magazine or zine, and write a story specifically to submit to it (which of course can be shopped around other places if it fails to sell to that one).
Um, this actually worked. I'm still kind of stunned that it worked, but it did. I sold three short stories this year, and finished a few more that are awaiting revisions. Not every one was written for a particular magazine or anthology, but a lot of them were, and simply the process of looking around and seeing who's buying short fiction, and then writing short fiction with their target audience and word counts in mind, is going a tremendous way towards getting me past my tendency to wander off in the middle of a story and never finish it. It also helped a lot that short projects were easier to pick up and put down than big projects, but simply being able to narrow down my goals and deadlines to very specific targets seemed to be the thing that made the big difference. I will definitely be doing this again next year!
Finish another novel, either one of the partial ones or a new one.
Nope. Work + school pretty much killed my ability to stick with a big project (which is why Sun-Cutter eventually went on hiatus, too). I worked actively on two novels during the year, but neither one of them is in very good shape.
Revise the sci-fi-Western novella.
Nope.
Write 1000 words or do 1 page of comics per day, every day that I'm not working at my day job.
Since I've been keeping pretty detailed records all year of what I've written, I actually can check my results here. *checks* Looks like 20 out of 52 weeks last year I made my goals. Which seems kind of dismal, except that nearly all of the missed weeks are in the last half of the year, when things kind of went to hell as far as being able to carve out creative time.
Make progress on the Kismet: Hunter's Moon and Freebird print editions.
Yes! Things are actually moving along at a pretty good clip on the Freebird book; I plan to spend a lot of time over the break working on new strips for it, and there's a vague chance it might be out in 2010. More likely 2011, though. It's still definitely on the front burner. And I've at least been thinking about the Hunter's Moon book, if not actually working on it actively.
I'm actually feeling pretty good about the past year. Here's my short list of what I did in 2009:
- Recorded daily writing totals (I actually started this in mid-2008, but this is the first year I've done it from the beginning of the year and been conscientious about it).
- Wrote ~117,000 words of original fiction; finished several short stories; worked on two novels.
- Finished several Kismet short comics.
- Started Sun-Cutter; then had to put it on hiatus.
- Quit work; went back to school.
- Sold three short stories - Hetsie's Wonders and two stories which will appear in very small-circulation anthologies coming out next year. I'm not precisely taking the world by storm, but I'm pretty damn psyched about this.
- Made solid progress towards publishing the print edition of Freebird.
Back shortly with my 2010 goals!