Yesterday, I went through numbers for 2018–words I wrote, hours I spent researching or worldbuilding or reading through for revisions, books I read–and I was a bit mixed about the results.
I read 91 books–technically less, because that includes comics and graphic novels, short stories, and novellas. I’d say something around 20ish fall under those categories, and some were audiobook rereads. I don’t have the numbers nearby, but as is normal for me, more women than men, though I didn’t look at how that broke down by single author–I read lots of books in series. Overall, that’s 20 more than 2017.
Writing wise, that’s not so good. I wrote all of about 9,100 words. Both the number written and the hours I spent on revisions and research and all was down from 2017, which was also greatly down from 2016. Yeah, I spent quite a bit of time polishing one novel and reading through a previous draft for potential rewriting, but I had a rough year and overall didn’t write much. Likely why I read so much more.
I know I can do better–in 2015 I wrote just under 81,000 and just over 51,000 in 2016. But I’m not berating myself. 9,100 is still words written, even if it’s not what it could’ve been.
This year, I’m going to attempt to write outside my comfort zone and see how I can do at writing romance. Or at least paranormal romance, since that fits into the sorta urban fantasy subset that I prefer. I’ve read quite a bit, though nowhere near extensively, and the most challenging thing I’ve found so far is that I’m not sure where to start looking for any helpful info. And it’s been so long since I began looking into SF/F that I don’t even remember how I got started there. It just kinda happened.
Hopefully I’ll finish one of the many, many, many different stories I’ve started, or maybe completely write something new. We’ll see.
(second blog post this year–already an improvement over the past.)
