What did I achieve? What did I miss? What went sideways, and what pleasantly surprised me? This is the data-backed story of 2021.
If you want to check out my previous reviews, see below:
By the Numbers
I track how much time I read, write, edit, and work on things related to writing. Each time is rounded up to the nearest fifteen minutes. I first track longhand using a weekly planner, with notes on where I worked, special events, appointments, and other activities. Then, I upload the numbers into an app called atWork. At the end of the year, I upload the data, clean it, and analyze it using Google Sheets.
Comparison Between Years
In 2021, I worked 1147 hours and 45 minutes.
I worked an average 3 hours and 8 minutes per day and a median of 3 hours per day.
The most I ever worked in a day was 7 hours and 30 minutes! I was only able to do it one day this year. The least I ever worked in a day was 15 minutes, which I did on two days. No zero days!
Hours per Week
Much easier to read, right? There are clear peaks and valleys throughout the year.
I worked an average of 22 hours and 20 minutes per week and a median of 21 hours and 30 minutes.
The most I ever worked in a week was 30 hours and 30 minutes. The least, 18 hours and 15 minutes.
Hours per Month
I worked an average of 95 hours and 38 minutes per month and a median of 103 and 22 minutes.
The most I ever worked in a month was in May: 108 hours and 45 minutes. The least, in August, was 65 hours and 45 minutes.
Summary of Numbers
I tend to be productive when I’m working in the office, have an easy workload, and aren’t dealing with family emergencies. When the U.S. started opening up after lockdown, I worked in cafes, I rode my bike to the library, and felt safer doing it. Hope that things would get better buoyed me above the clouds of anxiety.
Do I need data to know this? Of course not. Do I like having data to back up my suspicions? Of course. I track this way because it keeps me honest about where my time is going. It also helps me understand how to best position myself to make the most of things.
But this year confirmed something repeated in the news, on productivity and business blogs, and in my own life: much of what goes into having a productive day is not controllable. Productivity is really about attention. Where to place my attention, how long to place it, and the quality of that attention matters a great deal in finishing projects. But when life is an alarm clock with a broken mute button, attention shatters. My Dad passing away proved this.
When I took bereavement leave from work, I took bereavement leave from writing too. I couldn’t write as much as I normally could and support my mom simultaneously. Part of being a professional means knowing when to put your work down. I knew I would never permanently put my writing down. Remembering all the things my dad did to support my writing made me even more determined to get back to it.
By the Project
I used to divide my time into simple categories: writing, editing, research, reading, etc. As part of my 2021 New Year’s Resolution, I changed to a project-based system.
Boy howdy, I’m glad I did.
Those wafer-thin pie slices are tasks or projects I worked on the least: website maintenance, marketing, research, and time-tracking, as well as a few short stories I tinkered with off and on. Slices larger than 1% of the year got a label: submissions, “A Hole in the System”, “Singot”, etc. The top five projects I worked on (or 78% of my year), tell a better story.
Reading
I track my reading hours and count them towards writing. Why? Reading expands the tools and approaches I can bring to my own work and refreshes my imagination. For example, sometimes when I’m stuck on a scene in my own story, I’ll read something that demonstrates the thing that would fix my problem. Reading criticism and writing advice helps me think more deeply about what I write and why, and how one approach or another changes a story’s meaning.
And also—I hate to admit it—tracking how much I read helps me stay off social media.
I don’t track by the number of books I read. This year I started taking notes when I read (replace your bookmarks with index cards, people!). Thus, it takes me longer to finish a book. Fine with me. If I don’t retain anything, what’s the point of reading it? Or, if I’m not paying attention to the words, am I really reading? Or am I mindlessly consuming?
Perceiver 2
The second biggest project was the sequel to Perceiver. Unfortunately, due to my dad’s passing, my cousin’s wedding, and just recently, a nasty car accident, I’ve pushed back the date to turn in the manuscript to my editors. On top of that, I took the story in a brand new direction, which means a ton of scrapped chapters and major revisions.
The good news is, the new direction has lit a fire under me. When I plonk down at my desk and put pen to paper, the story feels like it’s guiding my hand. It’s a rare feeling, and it always means that the story is going to be great.
Diary
The third biggest project is my diary. I didn’t regularly keep a diary until 2020, when I found it difficult to keep up writing fiction during lockdown. Whatever snowmelt that had fed the spring of my imagination vanished. To keep up my three pages, I filled progressively smaller notebooks, swapped from writing novels, to short stories, to sketches of pandemic life.
Now at the end of the second year of the pandemic, I wonder, should I continue to add it to my writing projects? I think I will. The diary acts like a compost heap or a thought trap. When I skim through the pages, I feel like I have a better idea of what I pay attention to and who I try to be. Sometimes I’ll reread a past entry and think, “There’s something to that.” And that entry becomes fertile soil for a short story…..
Plague of Doppelgangers
…like “Plague of Doppelgangers”. About 6,000 words long as of today, the story has taken just under the amount of time to completely revise a draft of a novel. It still isn’t published. I’m still working on it. Why the h-e-double-fuck is it taking so long?
“Doppelganger” developed concept-first, and the characters and story came second. I completely scrapped and rewrote several drafts of the story before I found one that I stuck to. By comparison, “The Hole in the System” was also concept-first, but the story came easily. The Hole took just over 20 hours to finish and publish.
I still believe in “Plague of Doppelgangers” and the idea behind it. Editors and my writing group who have seen early drafts see where it sparkles, even as they can point out where it can be polished and where it’s too rough to be published. I think about it often and I’m not ready to let go of it—I’m still having fun.
That said, it’s time to move on. If I can’t improve “Doppelganger” within another 10 hours of work, I’m going to call it a learning experience and move on.
Blog
I worked on a lot of blog posts that never saw the light of day, which is inflating my numbers. Or ones like the Year in Review, which required a lot of analysis and thought. I think I’ll probably do something to what Brandon Tyler does on his substack. Thoughts and vibes. Occasional reviews.
Other Projects
The next top five projects with the most hours went to Submissions to writing residencies, magazines, contests, and more (59 hours), then Writing Group critiques, board meetings, and workshopping (51.5 hours), “Singot” (26.75 hours), “The Hole in The System” (22.75 hours), and Miscellaneous (15.5 hours).
I’m mostly fine with this. I don’t think I’ll submit to more residencies or contests this year because 1) submitting gets expensive 2) residencies want essays on top of fees, which means they’re an even bigger time suck. I don’t want to do a virtual residency or spend the time revising the applications only to have the residency canceled because of COVID. I also don’t have a large portfolio of published short fiction less than 4,000 words to submit as samples. I’ll just take a week off of work and write at a cafe or library.
I’d also like to spend most of my time (top five projects) working on fiction, short and long. I could have done better with tracking what I did for each project. For example, how much time I spent revising each chapter for Perceiver 2.
Summary of Projects
Here’s the thing to keep in mind with this insane tracking. Productivity isn’t measured in how much sand is left in the bottom of the hourglass. Effective productivity is a low ratio of what you put in and what you get out.
But much of what feeds a story is unquantifiable. Reading the right book at the right time; something weird happening that kickstarts an idea; someone cracking wise who becomes that character you need. Nobody can engineer destiny so that the thing you need plops into your hand, fully formed and ready to be massaged into your story.
But everyone can practice. And what is practice but making the basics a habit? As I’ve grown as a writer, it’s become easier to self-identify problems with my writing. The stakes aren’t clear. The characters aren’t making sense. The tension has slackened in this scene, and this other scene is good, but it doesn’t work with the rest of the scenes. Through practice, I’ve learned how to identify problems, and I have a larger mental toolbox of solutions.
In other words, I spend less time moaning, “How can I fix this?” and moving words around without improving the story. Instead, I just fix the story.
It takes time to learn how to write fast. I’m still learning.
Goals
Here are the resolutions I made for 2021. The ones I reached are in green; the ones I didn’t, in red.
#Project focused time tracking, rounding up to the nearest 15 minutes.
3 pages a day
Hire a cover artist for my first book
Publish my first book
Find beta readers for second book
Hire editors for second book
50 magazine submissions, stretch, 75
Stretch goal: publish second book.
I kept my goals low. If 2021 was anything like 2020 I wasn’t sure if I could keep them. But the only goal that I didn’t make was the 50 magazine submissions. I submitted 16 times. But I didn’t make this goal for an awesome reason: the short stories I submitted only had one or two rejections. I was expecting 15 a piece!
For 2022…
Hard goals:
- 3 pages of fiction every day. This time, I’m not going to count the diary as 3 pages. The diary will be its own daily thing. The 3 pages will be focused on fiction, blog posts, or other publishable work.
- 3 pages in my diary every day.
- Add hours to my time-tracking app at the end of every week. I got lax during 2020 and I’d add my time in huge bursts every month or so.
- Publish Perceiver 2 before the end of the year. Knock on wood.
Soft/Stretch goals:
- Don’t spend more than 15 hours on a 4,000 word short story. 20 hours for a 6,000 word short story. I gotta’ curb that bad habit.
- Take 5 short stories from draft to done, as a stretch goal. I’d like them to be under 4,000 words each. Most residencies, grants, magazines, etc tend to stick to 4,000 words as a limit, and I tend to go over it. If I can finish 5 this year, I’ll be happy.
- Adding my hours up every week will be key to making sure I don’t go over. Gotta’ keep an eye on the hourglass.
Concluding Thoughts
Here’s the easy-to-grok & undeniably good parts of 2021: I made it to 11 years of writing every day without missing a day. I hit most of my goals from last new year’s resolution. I published two short stories and a novel. The sequel to the novel is being briskly written and edited, in no small part because I finally understood something crucial about storytelling, something that I’ve somehow missed in 11 years of writing every day without missing a single day. To use Lisa Chron’s definition, “A story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result.” This lesson didn’t sink in completely until after August 4th, 2021.
This was the day my Dad passed away unexpectedly. August 4th was shortly after “Singot” was published and shortly before “The Hole in the System” and “Perceiver” were published. Dad never read these stories. I don’t know if he ever read any of my stories. It kills me that I didn’t share them with him. Especially because he had shared his with me first.
One day in 2018, he handed me a pair of flash drives with a trio of short stories he had written about the time he was in the Coast Guard. “Maybe you could do something with them,” he said offhandedly, over his shoulder, as he shuffled back to the recliner to watch a WWII documentary. “I just thought you’d like to have a look. Maybe clean them up and do something with them.”
I couldn’t imagine Dad as a writer. First, Dad was Dad. Then, hobbyist airplane maker and flyer. Professional airplane building, capping over 30 years at American Airlines as an avionics engineer. He wrote articles for airplane magazines, but even that writing was wrapped up in aviation.
When I think of him, I see him working in his workshop, a big building in the backyard filled with sanders, drillers, a 3D printer, an industrial printer, smelling of sawdust, paint, and airplane glue. There’s yellow light thrown onto the dusk-dark lawn, and through the window on the door I can see him passing wood through a bandsaw, pecking at his computer, or arranging the airy internal structure of an airplane wing. The silver hair on his arms is always powdered with sawdust.
I assumed he was born on an airplane. He rarely talked about his life; hell, he rarely talked. While digging through Dad’s desk for legal documents to send to the funeral home, we found his discharge papers. Dad had received a Silver Award, one of the highest honors in the Coast Guard, for rescuing people from a burning boat.
The two flash drives held the greatest quantities of his interior life that I would ever read in one sitting. I was afraid they would be great. That he was an undiscovered talent, the way I hoped I was. I was afraid they’d be terrible. That he wasn’t worth knowing. I was afraid that he would be a different man than I thought he was.
But I wanted to know him. I plugged in the flash drives and started reading.
Sometimes when I read, the author captures a feeling or thought so familiar that it gives me the feeling that someone is watching me. It jolts me. It’s the author seeing me through the fence of their sentences and speaking to me.
Reading Dad’s stories was a reversal of that feeling. It wasn’t exactly his voice. It was the voice of someone who was trying to write like novels he liked to read, nonfiction military biographies and first person war stories, all bravado and military jargon. But it was Dad, undeniably.
The first story I read was titled, “My Most Memorable Rescue.” The first paragraph is as follows:
“My most memorable rescue wasn’t the most spectacular or most dangerous rescue I was involved in. In fact it could have been called a really ho hum rescue. What makes it memorable to me was not only the fact that it was the day or so before I got married, but also the response of the kids I had picked up that day.”
He had been called out with his rescue crew to Crystal Beach, Texas when a couple of kids were blown out to sea in their inner tubes. When the chopper zoomed over the kids, he saw their faces light up. Wow! We get to ride in a helicopter! And when he and his crew returned to shore, the community had gathered on the beach. Sand billowed from the chopper’s downwash; clothes flapped against chests, baseball caps flipped off heads, hair lashed their shoulders. And when the boys were released onto the beach, the boys’ mother swept them all into her arms and sobbed. Applause showered all around.
I’d seen a picture of him and Mom on their wedding day. He looks just about the same, but trimmer, dark haired, and sporting a mustache you could use as a boomerang. I can close my eyes and imagine the boomerang descending from the flame-blue Texan sky and returning, as if it had been thrown by God.
It was too late to ask the most flattering question you can ask a storyteller: “What happened next?” But that isn’t the right question anyway, because what happened next was already known. More kids happened: my brother and I. Then a house happened in Claremore, OK with a workshop in the backyard, and thirty-two years at American Airlines as a lead mechanic.
The real question was, why did this rescue matter to him? The writer side of me noted that these weren’t technically stories. They were anecdotes. An anecdote can be summed up as, “This crazy thing happened to me.” A story can be summed up as, “This crazy thing happened to me, and what happened changed me.”
Dad’s stories were about slipping his coworker exploding cigarettes, calling the officers “pukes”, and the long boring nights aboard a ship stationed in Alaska. They never culminated in an observation about humanity, a punchline, or a change in Dad’s psyche. Dad’s most memorable rescue never delves into why the rescue changed him.
There’s an obvious and comforting explanation to why the rescue meant so much to him. He had just been married; those kids could have been his. Though back then, I didn’t have the experience as a writer or the courage as a daughter to confirm why these stories mattered to him, I didn’t need to confirm. He bought me at least one book whenever we went to the bookstore, and I sit here among shelves ceiling high and shelves two books deep. He paid for the summer writing camps where I had the usual epiphanies of young artistic women, and the contest fees for contests I would win, or at least win honors. He encouraged me to go to schools and colleges hours away, if it meant I would get a better education, be around better people.
My brother and I were 3 and 4 years old when the workshop was built. Our handprints mark the concrete foundation, along with our ages, drawn with our fingers.
I often ask myself, “What is the story of Dad’s life?” Though I was his daughter, I didn’t witness a full half of it. The half from birth to age twenty-seven. The age he was when I was born. The age I was when he died. He never spoke about which events changed him, except these. Otherwise, why write them down? Even if he didn’t have the ability to craft what I believe to be a story—about how an experience changes you as a person—surely he did have stories. Because the alternative is that Dad’s life was an anecdote. A crazy thing that happened. Not even crazy. Ho-hum.
Around the time Dad had given me his short stories, I read Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel lecture, “My Father’s Suitcase.” Pamuk’s father had given him “a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts, and notebooks” sometime after his father abandoned his family to be a writer in Paris. While writing this post, I reread it again, and the first two paragraphs shook me to my cells.
“Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts, and notebooks. Assuming his usual joking, mocking air, he told me he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after he died.
“‘Just take a look,’ he said, slightly embarrassed. “See if there’s anything inside that you can use. Maybe after I’m gone you can make a selection and publish it.’”
Pamuk had been afraid to read what his dad had written, because he knew what it meant to be given this a piece of yourself, shaped in solitude, at a cluttered desk, at an odd hour, to the one kid who would understand what it meant to be given a story, better than the writer-father understood.
And I’m remembering him again. It’s after sunset in my memory, as it always is. And he’s in the workshop, lights beaming out. Blueprints on the floor, sawdust hanging in the air, airplane parts scattered. He’s bent over the workshop table, building yet another plane, like he hadn’t been building real airplanes for his nine-to-five.
And I realize there’s only the present and the rest is imagination. I’m writing this now at my desk, as I always write these reviews. The sun descended hours ago, and my lamp looks warmly over my work. My room ripens with the odor of decaf instant coffee and the oils of sleep. There’s crumpled post-its cluttering my desk and carpet, and they say things like, “What questions do you wish you had asked Dad before he died? (why did these rescues matter to you) What are the answers you hope to receive? (because we mattered to you) When do stories resonate? (when they rhyme with your life).”
The story of our lives recounts the most dangerous experience we undergo—for nobody gets out alive. What’s worse is that most of it is barely worth writing down or remembering. But what makes it memorable are the people who descended into our lives and how they left themselves and us altered.
It’s the story of how we become ourselves through others.