It has been a year.
I moved. My parents opened up a restaurant. I took several long breaks, some were desperately needed, others were mandatory due to the move.
It’s been interesting. I have to give it that.
This was also the first year in which I had set actual goals for myself that I wanted to get done. Last year, 2018, I only wanted to see what I could and couldn’t do over the course of a year as I worked on my writing and building a platform.
So now, much like my usual monthly wraps, I’m wrapping up the year to see what I managed to do and see what I realistically can and can’t do for next year.
So, let’s get on with it.
Trials for the Princess Ryanne and War for the Good King are going through major overhauls right now. I’m writing this post before I’m writing the post addressing it. But needless to say, neither of those are done at this moment.
As for the anthology, I have the outlines fixes, most of the rough drafts written up, some of them are typed up and on my computer, most of them have titles, but I’m not really happy with the title for the book itself just yet. So, I would say I’m about seventy percent done with the first phase of this piece. As I have said before, I came up with a few more stories that I really want to put in that tie up some more loose ends, so I still have those I need to do.
I’ve abandoned the idea for a newsletter for this year. And, honestly, I think I’m going to leave that idea for now. At this moment, I don’t really feel like I make enough quality content, or am a popular enough author to warrant monthly newsletters. Perhaps in the next few years, I’ll implement one, but for right now it just doesn’t seem like a good idea for me.
As for the revamp of the site I wanted to do. Well… You can see how that turned out. It didn’t. I’m not even really sure what I was planning to do in terms of revamping the site. I think more than anything I just wasn’t super into the layout or pictures. But I can fix that eventually if I’m still so inclined. But I’m not going to worry about that right now.
About the twelve writing contests, I wanted to enter. Yeah… that didn’t happen. I even changed my goals for this to be one contest before the end of the year. That still didn’t happen. But that’s okay. I had so much going on, I’m not upset about it.
I managed to read more than twenty-five books this year. For those of you who follow me on Goodreads, you’d see that at this moment I’ve read twenty-six. I still have a couple weeks until the end of the year at the time of writing this, so I’m not sure what the actual final count is yet. But I’m happy I managed to do this. Especially when I changed this goal from twenty-five to twenty because I wasn’t sure I could do the extra five. But I did. So, I’m very happy about that.
I did manage to outline Realm of the Demon Empress. And I’m very happy with how it’s turned out so far. It took way longer than I first expected to properly outline it and add in all the detail and extra scenes I wanted. It ended up being sixty-something pages before, and about thirty-one after I typed it up and printed it out. So I’m very happy about that.
I didn’t manage to write three short stories this year, but I did manage to write one. And I’m very happy about the premise of it, less so about the way it ends. But, you know what, it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around, it just has to exist.
I did do a blog event/challenge. The 12 days of Blogmas, which was actually a lot of fun.
I didn’t do a one year anniversary post. That time passed while I was still unpacking and trying to figure my room out after the move. So I couldn’t. But that’s okay, there’s always next year.
I haven’t finished ‘Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Getting Serious About Writing Part 2’, but I am working on it. It’s certainly getting there.
I stopped trying the weekly writing prompts. I didn’t like how it looked on the blog, and on top of that, they weren’t my personal prompts. So I felt kinda icky taking them, despite the fact I tried to give credit where it was due. So that stopped.
I’ve made a few playlists on Youtube for the various pieces I’m working on, and the tone I need them to set. But they aren’t completely done, and there are a few I still need to make up.
And I did the research I needed to, to a degree. I still have a bit more I need to do to get it as accurate as I want to though.
So, calculating it all out, marking the ones I only partially completed as a half, I got five out of fifteen done. It’s not bad. Especially when you consider the fact I realized several things weren’t going to happen, and everything that happened this year.
Overall I’m pretty happy with what happened. And I’m looking forward to getting more done next year. Or, tomorrow I guess.
What did you manage to get done this year? What did you manage to tick off your list for the new year? I’d love to hear if you’d like to share.
I hope you’re having a great new years eve, and if it’s not great I hope it gets better. We’re about to enter a new decade, meaning we have new opportunities awaiting us. And I will see you next time.
-T.R. Flynn.
T.R.FlynnOfficial 