I was going to post this in January 2020. Then February. Then March. And then the months smeared together when the pandemic erased everything. 

2019 was not a great year writing-wise. But you should see it, and I should own it. 

Lots of things happened this year. My part-time job turned into full-time, with all the blessings and curses that brings. I found a steady system for sending out short stories, created an editing schedule I actually stuck with, and God knows how many hours I’ve wasted on stupid tasks. 

This is my year of being a full-time idiot, with infographics, charts, and gifs. This is a long, long article. Here’s a table of contents.

1. Writing & Publishing Goals for 2019— did I meet my goals?
2. Time Analysis— a break down of the hours I  tracked  
3. Writing & Publishing Goals for 2020
4. Closing Thoughts

Time Analysis

I started time-tracking last year with a system I devised. Here are the results for 2019!

Things take time. Obviously. 

If there’s one thing I learned from my time-tracking is that the little things take a lot more time than I’d thought. Researching magazines, formatting my stories the way they want, submitting them. Looking over other people’s stories for the writing group, showing up to the workshops. Updating the website. Hours submitting short stories, researching places to submit. 

But what did I accomplish?

Writing & Publishing Goals for 2019

Continue writing 3 pages a day —Check

Nine straight years without missing a single day of writing, and the second full year of writing 3 pages every day! Woohoo!

Continue practicing self-editing —Check

A soft goal. I’d like to say I did it. For sure, this year I revised enough stories that I had a regular rotation of submissions.

Write or do writing-related work 36 hours a week. Stretch goal: 40 —Nope

I track this through a running weekly average. When I returned to being full-time, my average dropped to 33 hours a week. Still good, but it stings that I couldn’t keep that up. 

Type up 6 pages from old notebooks per day. When finished, keep no more than one notebook untyped—Nope 

I sort of did it. I did a good job of keeping up, until about three months or so before I moved to full-time. Then I said, “Fuck it, I have money now.” I hired my roommate to type up the rest. 

Post on blog at least twice a month —Nope 

I’ve published 21 blog reviews and analysis. For manga. (image: “This was supposed to be a writing blog”)

Begin working with editors, cover designers, and formatters on a novel-length story. Stretch goal: self-publish a novel by the end of the year—Nope

I commissioned a cover for a standalone novel that I didn’t return to until half a year later. No way is it ready for an editor. On the other hand, the first book in my trilogy is ready for an editor, and I have a list of freelance editors who I will contact… as soon as I have the money to pay them. Car trouble took bites out of my savings.  

Publish three works, either self-publish or place in magazines, or submit at least to 25 different places—Half Check

Nothing got published at all. But I did overshoot my submission goals. And I got two personal rejections, one with comments. I realize now that placing three works in magazines was a super lofty goal for 2019. Same with self-publishing. I’ll go into this more below.   

Set marketing goals—Nope 

Can’t have marketing goals if you ain’t got shit to market. 

Set sales goals—Nope

Can’t have sales goals if you ain’t sold shit. 

This year disappointed me. I didn’t spend my time as wisely as I could have. We all feel this way to a certain extent: we get sucked into a Youtube analysis or a manga, or we piddle around with projects that we tell ourselves, “When I have something ready to publish, I’ll have everything in place! Taking off will be a breeze!” but the project just sits there, because it can’t happen until you’re ready to publish, but you’re not ready to publish because you spend your time doing this side project instead! Where did all that time go?

Fortunately, in the middle of the year, I started tracking what exactly I was doing when I was writing, editing, researchings, etc. How much time was I spending writing articles? What about editing novels? Though I’m only working with half a year’s data, the results were interesting. 

I spent over 90 hours typing up old notebooks. That’s a little less than half the total time I spent editing this year alone. 

In hindsight, I think my goals for 2019 were overambitious. I couldn’t have made some of the more vague goals, like “Work with editors, formatters, and cover artists on a novel-length story.” I mean, I commissioned cover art for a novel, but the novel itself isn’t ready to face an editor. I’m doing the things that should come after finishing the novel. I’m making a book, but the words aren’t in the right order yet.

Writing Goals for 2020

This year, I’m going to keep my goals actionable.

Continue writing 3 pages a day

Obviously this time I’m going to do it on my computer. 1000 words a day might be a clearer goal, since I write small and write in large notebooks.

Edit for 1 hour a day. Stretch goal: 1.5 hours

Cribbed from my annual anti-NaNoWriMo, in which I edit a full-length novel instead of write one. I was able to edit 1.5 hours a day for the whole of November (it nearly killed me). One hour? Doable. 

Submit to at least 50 places. Stretch goal: 75

Cribbed from this article on Lithub. I didn’t realize last year that in order to submit a lot, you have to have a lot of stuff that’s submission ready. And if you don’t know how to edit your work to reach that level, then you’re wasting your time AND you’re wasting your chance on places that might otherwise take your work (since most places don’t reconsider a submission, even if you’ve overhauled your story). And this is, of course, for short story and poetry submissions. 

Hire editor for novel

This goal is deliberately vague. I’m not sure what the timeline would be following hiring an editor. What’s achievable? What’s not? I would like to have one novel self-published by the end of next year, but that was my goal last year. So, I’ll hire an editor and start working with them on cleaning up my work. 

Closing Thoughts

I am so twisted and torn up about this year. I escaped 2019 limping. 

If I were to take the harshest view, I was given an incredible opportunity: to have a salaried part-time job with benefits while I lived at home and cold write. Yet, I squandered that time by reading too much and typing up old notebooks rather than writing and editing more. I spent too much on notebooks and pens this year too. I didn’t make many of my goals, and I know I could have if I had just sent my work to more magazines, used better words in better orders, edited them with lapidary attention… et cetera is an eight letter word that contains a year of excuses. I have a front row seat to my daily failure to do more, better. 

It doesn’t help that in my personal life, I feel like I’m losing friends to the gradual, inevitable growing apartness elsewhere. It’s amazing to me that we stayed together as a writing group for so long. Literally each member is hundreds of miles from each other. We had a good run, and I miss them all. 

I won’t beat myself up for reading too much. Books have saved me before, and they are saving me now. 

There’s also the persistent feeling that writing is one of the least important things I could be doing with my time. Climate change, fascism, earning money, exercising. 

The feeling that I should be doing something else nags me. Even writing this Year in Review! Shouldn’t I be editing my books?

But the point of writing is to be read. I’ve been thinking about this past year about what I want my writing to do, what I think about writing and reading, who it’s for, and what I find meaningful and important. Sometime this year, writing became more than a way to entertain myself and think about things. 

This year, my blog has taken a more philosophical turn, thanks to the influence of Breadtube (HBomberguy, Philosophy Tube, and Contrapoints, among others). Where does meaning come from? How do things mean? The reality is, you can’t choose what snags your heart. I didn’t know that this year I would read books that would change the way I think about writing and how I want to be read. 

Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach. 

I want to write something incredible, like these books. I write because I love to read. I don’t have a great story about my family telling me stories as a kid— we weren’t talkers. We were readers. We just liked reading. Early on, I found out that people wrote books, and I decided that I would do it too. I remember writing poetry when I was six and bugging my mom to wake up from a nap to copy the poem because her handwriting was prettier than mine. I loved reading Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Rowling, and Pullman. And I grew to love writing that made me look at the world in a new way, or notice something that was always there, or never be able to see the world the same way again. I sought out lines that twisted alive with rich sensory detail. I wrote stories with pages and pages of description because I thought that’s what good writing needed— tons and tons of adjectives and adverbs!

I love the feeling when an author can put into words what you felt wounded you but could not identify, or when the book’s eyes blinked open and gazed kindly into your squishy and vulnerable soul. To learn more— about everything— everyone— writing to learn what you think about something. 

I enjoy watching people enjoy reading. 

I write because I want to write a book that someone will devour, at the end, sigh, “wow,” and feel both full and cored out, and when reread you find something new. I want to write something that means as much to them as my favorites did to me.

Every time I start a story, I forget how hard it is to finish it. But if I believed that the first draft was the last, then I would never have confidence in myself. Watching a story evolve from a passionate blurt to something that astonishes me has been one of the greatest satisfactions in writing. 

And that’s what this Year in Review is for— a way to look back with a gaze that cuts through the mundane myopia of anxiety, self-doubt and laziness— and compresses time to show what I have done is a lot more than I thought. Even as I fumble to write something that reaches the standards I yearn for. 

Around October, I submitted a very short story to my new writing group to workshop it. Somebody gave me the comment: “I feel like I can read this over and over and keep thinking about it.”

And that made nine years telescope into the certain knowledge that I was on the right path.

2019 will be my springboard into 2020. I feel it.