Looking Back, Looking Forward
Here at the beginning of a new year, I wanted to take a minute to look back at the dreams I dreamed last January... wide-eyed and full of hopes and schemes.
For reference, here is the post where I listed the things I wanted to accomplish in 2018.
How'd I do?
Publish Minstrel's Call. Check! The final chapter of the Minstrel's Song series released on February 28, 2018, exactly 6 years after the release of King's Warrior.Draft books 3-5 of Turrim Archive. Partial check. I drafted all of book 3 and am about half-to-two-thirds of the way through book 4. I had a Minstrel's Song side-story published in the Mythical Doorways anthology, and I wrote a short story and published it in the Paws, Claws, and Magic Tales anthology, and wrote a piece of flash fiction for Havok magazine, which will be publishing next week. I tallied it up and discovered that in the past year I wrote approximately 204,111 words in various stories.Write fun blog posts. Check! I wrote 128 blog posts this past year, and I think they were pretty fun. I hosted the third annual February is Fantasy Month and Silmarillion Awards events, and a good time was had by all. I haven't tallied up all the words in those posts, but since my average post-length is about 750 words, we can extrapolate another 96,000 words written just here on the blog. (Hm... maybe I'd get more books written if I stopped blogging.... *grin*)Polish up my Cinderella retelling. Um... no. Didn't touch it. Poor little neglected thing.Short stories for my monthly newsletters.... nope. Too busy writing other things.Attend Realm Makers. CHECK! And it was awesome!Read 50 books (via Goodreads challenge). CHECK! I read 56.5 books in 2018, and I talked about my favorites already, so that's good.
This wasn't even on my radar last year when I was making goals, but back in November, I wrote a piece of flash fiction for the new online magazine HAVOK and they accepted it! It is being published next Tuesday! It's a sci-fi story called DEJA VU and I'm excited to share it with you all!
So, looking ahead... what am I dreaming for 2019?
Going to keep chipping away at last year's dream. Hopefully I can finish up the first draft of the Turrim Archive books, and maybe even begin editing them.I teased a little bit about this in my November Newsletter, but I also have a children's picture book in the works that I'm hoping to release in October. There may even be plans in the works for a coordinated launch party of this book with Brittany Jean's 4th album... and maybe some events/tour-like things going on with that. We shall see... we are still very much in the dreaming stages at this point. I'll keep you posted.There's also a bit of a dream for a box-set edition of Minstrel's Song... but some things will have to fall into place perfectly for that to occur.I have a convoluted set of fairy-tale-esque stories swimming around in my head begging me to write them (these do include my Cinderella retelling, as well), but I don't think I'm going to have time to get to them this year. Turrim Archive comes first.The blog might be a little quieter this year, as I am hoping to spend most of my writing energies on actual stories. I'm not abandoning you! I promise! But my posts may be a little more intentional. For Jan/Feb I will be posting for the Read Along (don't forget to grab your free copy of Second Son so you can join the fun!) and February is Fantasy Month, but after that I'm going to try to stick to a once-a-week schedule. And I definitely plan on doing the Silmaril Awards again this year!I'm also dreaming about finally moving into our new home (soon! hopefully!)...
...and continuing to homeschool my four hobbits (L claims she's too tall to be a hobbit and insists that she's an elf) and reading a ton of awesome books (though I toned down my Goodreads challenge to 35 for this year... mostly so that I don't get overwhelmed by it... reading is supposed to be for FUN)... maybe getting back into rock climbing... and just generally enjoying each day that the Lord gifts me with.