Quick Update and 2020 Writing Goals (with #HabiticaResolutions)

So, came onto here to do this post, and was shocked to see that I haven’t posted to this blog since Nov. 2018. Whoof. More than a year has gone by!

So, a quick summary of the last year, and then the details re my goals for this year (which is what this post is meant to be about).

There have been a couple of posts over the last year over on tagÂûght, covering some autistic related stuff (and a neat pub that a friend of my youngest sister’s owns here in St. John’s). Other than that… overall it was a quiet year. My rheumatologist added another medication to help with the nagging pain still going on with my arthritis, I made a couple of new friends, starting using Habitica to build my good habits up, got a volunteer position (I just had my third shift today), and survived Snowmaggedon 2020! (76 cm – about 2-1/2 feet – of snow in 36 hours. 8-day State of Emergency. Imber was happy – I was inside for basically nine whole days, with a 10 minute outing on Day 7 and a 3 hour outing on Day 8 – but I have to admit I was starting to go stir crazy by then.)

Now, onto the important part ( 😉 ) – my writing!

Didn’t win NaNoWriMo 2019 (*pouts a bit*) but I did get close, with over 43K words. Also didn’t get A Fox’s Fight ready for publication last year. *sighs* I didn’t get much writing done last year at all, in part because thanks to the overly busy November and then family gatherings in December of 2018, I got burned out quite thoroughly, and that affected my ability to handle creative stuff.

This year is going to be different, however. NaNo 2019 was a max of two write-ins a week that I organized, which took a bit of a load off (and I had people who came to most of them!). And I got my first two weeks of January more or less quiet, and then Snowmaggedon hit. That let me recover thoroughly.

And while I know where a fair few issues are in A Fox’s Fight, I think I kind of burned out on it too for the moment, so instead this year I’m going to concentrate on getting Search & Rescue ready for publication. What that means is finishing the re-write of the last 6-1/4 (or so) chapters (I’m most of the way through the rewrite of Chp. 8, and there are 14 chapters in total), then doing the editing, and then getting ready to publish!

I’m using Habitica, and the Habitica New Year’s Resolution Guild, to help me actually manage to do this. My plan for January was to get into the habit of writing 400 words minimum every day through working on some of my fanfic (which didn’t really work), and then start the editing and re-writing of S&R in February. But I couldn’t work up the attention span to do much with the fanfic (sorry!), so over the last couple of days I’ve gone through the chapters of S&R that have already been re-written to find any issues there, and I’m going to start fixing them/continuing the rewrite as of tomorrow. Which is getting a bit of an early start on things, but that’s all to the good!

My plan is to devote February and March to finishing the rewrite (maybe April as well, but I’m hoping to be done by April). Then May through July or August to editing and getting commentary by my beta-readers/editors. Then August or September through October to getting what I need for publishing it set up (cover, ISBN, Library of Congress number, etc.), and get it self-published either end of October or beginning of December.

We’ll see how that goes, and I’ll try to remember to post details and a monthly update here!

🙂 tag0

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