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.

( Checking last year's goals against my actual progress )

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!

Goals for 2010

My creative goals for 2010:

* Finish new Freebird strips and get book to publisher.

* Write 1000 words of fiction per day (or, 1 finished comics page = 2000 words of fiction; I realized last year that I have to have some sort of conversion like this, or I never do any comics pages AT ALL; one comics page is WAY more effort than writing 1000 words). If I keep this up, I'll end the year with some sort of compromise between 365,000 words of fiction (3 novels!) and ~180 comics pages (1 graphic novel!). Of course, the problem is that I seem to wander between projects and never finish any of them. We shall see.

* Continue writing specifically targeted short stories and attempting to sell them.

* Make (at least) 1 sale to an SFWA qualifying market. Or at least TRY, by submitting to these markets every chance I get.

* Finish the rough draft of 1 novel. (I'd like to end the year with a novel sitting, completed, on my desktop.)

* Revise "Sea Change", my NaNo novel from 2007.

* Work more on Sun-Cutter. Amass backlog of pages and begin updating by end of year.

* Revise the damn sci-fi-Western novella and write the sequel which seems to have mysteriously wandered into my brain. *shakes brain to see if story drops out*

* Get HM book into some semblance of order; decide whether to do POD or press run; make actual progress towards making it happen.

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope the new year is good for you.