Introduction
If you’re sick of yearly round ups from people who’ve written a million words, climbed Mt. Fuji using only their hands, and developed rippling abs, you’ve come to the right place. I set many resolutions last year and kept only one of them.
But many wonderful things happened this year that I never expected. I wanted to share the numbers and explain how they don’t express the larger message: that I’m getting close to writing the kinds of stories I’ve always wanted to write, and the life to support my writing.
This is the fifth data-backed story of my year.
For previous reviews, here is a list of links:
Methodology
“I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.”
Admiral James Rickover, father of the modern nuclear navy
This quote has guided my ethos in staying productive and on track to achieving my writing goals: to write a story that someone will devour, at the end, sigh, “wow,” and feel both full and cored out; and, when reread, will find something new. I want to write something that means as much to readers as my favorites did to me. To achieve that lofty goal, I created a writing system to generate a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.
I track time by project* and task. Using pomodoro apps like this one or this one, the timer on my computer, or even glancing at the clock, I note when I start and stop. Time spent is rounded up to the nearest fifteen minutes. I first record longhand using a weekly planner, with notes on where I worked, special events, appointments, and other activities. Then, weekly or monthly, I upload the numbers into an app called atWork. At the end of the year, I download the data, clean it, and analyze it using Google Sheets.
For example, a typical day’s time entry might look like this:
Perceiver 2, 1.0 hours, editing
Reading, 1.0 hour
TikTok, 0.75 hour, scripting
This is the perfect amount of detail for me. Tracking by time isn’t as strict as a word count, which isn’t always the best measure of progress on a project. Though, I’ll track word count for new stories just to keep myself at a steady completion rate. If a certain task is taking up too much time, I can look it over to see where I can improve the process. For example, one year I discovered that typing up my notebooks took over 80 hours to complete. So… I switched the three pages to my diary and tried to write solely on the computer.
But. It didn’t work. Because I’m almost always staring at a screen for work, and then TikTok, after a certain point my eyes felt like they’re drying up and rolling out of my skull. Instead of writing more fiction on the computer, I just wrote in my tiny diary and called that writing. Paradoxically, by trying to work more efficiently, I ended up working less.
There’s something about writing that first draft longhand that just works for me. Printing and editing my work by hand helps too. But, I rewrote much of Perceiver 2 bypassing my notebook entirely. Maybe there’s still hope for me? I’ll circle back to this later.
For projects like TikTok (or in general, Social Media Management), I only time track when I’m working deliberately, such as scripting, recording, editing, posting, or responding to questions and comments. If I’m mindlessly scrolling, it doesn’t count as work. Same for research. For example, I watched a documentary about fungi for a short story. I kept pausing the documentary to take down the names of interviewed researchers and to take notes. But soon after, I watched another documentary about deep sea gigantism. The time I spent watching the second documentary wasn’t tracked, because I didn’t do it for anything I was writing.
*2022 is my first full year tracking my time by project rather than task.
By the numbers
Clearly the trend is going down. But, three of the last five logged years have been a pandemic. The big drop in 2020 is my first full year working a full-time job. My goal isn’t always to work more—it’s to work more efficiently. My heart sinks when I think of what I could have done… but it lifts knowing how much I accomplished during the tumult of the last year.
I worked an average of 2.93 hours per day, median 2.75 hours. I wrote the typical daily entry above as an example before I analyzed the data. Turns out, that’s a pretty good idea of what I do every day. I read a little, write a little, market a little.
By the project
Thoughts about the data
Reading, as always, takes the number one spot. I’m always hesitant to include it—it feels like padding my hours. But I’ve found it useful to include for a three reasons:
- It encourages me to read more. I hate to say it, but the pull of social media is strong. Having another reason to finish a book that is boring but necessary for story research helps push me to finish it.
- Since 2021, I’ve started taking heavy notes on every book I read. What the book made me feel/think, where it made me feel/think, and why I think it made me feel/think. Story notes, criticism, or thoughts on how the book is relevant helps me put into words how my own stories fail or succeed while they’re in the draft stage.
- Reading often is critical to writing well. Making space to read furthers my goals of writing something great. Writing reading notes makes me a better writer and feeds into my TikTok reviews, which also make me a better writer and helps me sell books, which helps me keep writing and reading…. I can’t untangle reading from writing. Thus, I include it.
Perceiver 2 at #2 with almost 220 hours! Seeing all the hours spent at my desk condensed to a statistic shocked me. Eventually, I’ll have an official name to declare.
Social Media should really be relabeled TikTok. I did not imagine my TikTok channel would grow to this extent. I started it like I started all my other social media channels: to maintain some kind of presence on the internet and thrust my book in the faces of strangers. But it turns out people like my weirdo reviews. Before I could blink, I had about 3,000 people following me, and some sales, opportunities, and cool connections. I’m still fleshing out how I should track time spent reviewing and creating videos, but I intend to track it as seriously as I do everything else. Eventually I’d like to write about how TikTok has changed how I write and tell stories and how people find and read them.
Diary… I felt uncertain about including it as part of my system. Writing in my diary helped me stay sane during lockdown. It was easier to record what was happening than squeeze fiction straight from my overheated brain. I pieced together stories from its pages and used many of the thoughts, feelings, events, and dialogue I recorded verbatim. I’ve also written blog posts, parts of short stories, and TikTok scripts as part of filling out my daily three pages. Despite what I choose to write and the size of the journal I wrote in, the fact is, I wrote three pages a day this year, and I didn’t miss a single day. But next year, I won’t be including it as part of my writing system. I’ve included writing in my diary in this review for posterity.
Writing Group! I have been a part of a talented group of writers to swap manuscripts and share advice. I track the time I spend looking over their work, attending the weekly meetings, and getting my own work critiqued. Getting regular feedback from knowledgeable sources is key to improving.
The other projects not listed include many short stories you’ll see in the coming year. 🙂
Goals
Here are the resolutions I made for 2022. The ones I reached are in bolded.
2022
Hard goals
- 3 pages of fiction every day. This time, I’m not going to count the diary as 3 pages.
- 3 pages in my diary every day.
- Add hours to my time-tracking app at the end of every week.
- Publish Perceiver 2 before the end of the year.
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.
- Take 5 short stories from draft to done, as a stretch goal. I’d like them to be under 4,000 words each.*
Thoughts on 2022 goals
Why do I think I didn’t make these goals? I think I was underestimating the lingering effects of the pandemic, burnout, and overwork from the previous year. I always aim high, because I don’t want to go easy on myself. Yet, I hadn’t let myself truly rest. When I didn’t hit the numbers, I felt discouraged. This video explains my feelings perfectly.
Failing to meet arbitrary goals I set for myself made my self-esteem and self-respect conditional on meeting those goals. I berated myself for not working hours every day, not using every scrap of time to its utmost. Focusing on productivity made me overly selfish and self-involved. I’d resent family and friends for reaching out to me, or me reaching out to them, and then I’d feel self-reproach for feeling that way. How much I enjoyed something was not something I included in my tracking, and there was no room for things like rest, funerals, sickness, and vacation.
But the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
- I resold a story to an anthology
- I got interviewed on a podcast
- I got on TikTok and gained nearly 3,000 followers in 6 months
- I finished a new draft of my sequel
- In my personal life, I got a new remote job doing what I love (with a 30% raise!)
- I got into weightlifting and dropped a whole pant size
- I’ve learned so much about writing and storytelling that my views on what I want to accomplish with my art has transformed
While I can’t say that I’m happy that I’ve fallen short of the goals I’ve set for myself, this year is far away from a loss.
So what about next year?
Thoughts on 2023 goals
I usually decide daily resolutions by November, and test them out for the month of December. If I don’t think they’re feasible, then I tweak until I can do them daily.
I first set my usual— 3 pages every day. The 3 pages were hard. I exchanged my tiny diary for the A5 journals I used in college and returned to fiction. It wasn’t the size that was a stretch. It was the reworking of disused muscles, to generate material rather than pull it unfiltered from life. But it felt good to return.
I also wanted to set a daily goal of an additional 1000 words or 1.5 hours of editing/revision/or some other necessary task. Too much. I dropped to 750 words/1 hour after the first week of December. Then got my ass handed to me one hectic week at work and realized I depended on work being slow to add 100 words here, 250 there. But I can’t count on that being the case every day. I finally dropped to 500 words/30 minutes in the last two weeks of December. I can always try to add more later, when I get used to the load.
As for TikTok, I originally started my channel to promote my work. I’m still uncomfortable telling people to buy my books and read my stories. But this year, I want to become more comfortable talking about my writing online and enticing people to support me. So, I’m setting a goal of one writing update vlog-style per week, tying my current writing projects to what I’m learning with these books on writing and storytelling. Plus, one review on a book on writing and storytelling per week.
2023
Hard goals
- 3 pages every day. The diary will no longer count.
- 500 words a day OR 0.5 hours of writing/editing/revising that isn’t the 3 pages
- 1 weekly vlog with writing updates
- 1 weekly review on a book about writing and storytelling
- Add hours to my time-tracking app at the end of every month (I’m going to try this one again, with some key habit changes to make sure I stick with it)
Soft goals
- Send Perceiver 2 off for editing
- 5 short stories from draft to done (I’m going to try this again)
- 10,000 followers on TikTok
- Review another 26 books on writing and storytelling (right now, I’ve reviewed 26, or one a week since I started my TikTok.)
Concluding Thoughts
When I try to think of an anecdote that sums my year tidily, I can’t. Maybe it’s this one:
The editor of the magazine that published “Singot” and “The Heebie-Jeebie Beam” emailed all the authors who had been published in his pages. Awards season was upon us, and if they wanted him to nominate them for anything, to please let him know. If you’re unfamiliar with the backstage workings of the science fiction and fantasy literary community, you might be taken aback that such blunt promotion is acceptable. But it’s a thing. And it always pits my god complex against my imposter syndrome. Do I say, “I don’t know if my work is good enough to be awarded”? Or, “I’m happy that you’ve considered me”? Do I say what I want the editor to do and want myself to believe? “Nominate me for everything! My work will serve you your own heart, and you’ll eat it and thank me later”?
I don’t just want to be good. I want to be seen being good. Those are nice dueling phrases. I wish I had thought of them myself instead of paraphrasing them from Zadie Smith, who had everything I wanted happen to her at the age I wish it happened to me.
Especially because, at that age, I was hoping to be saved by my career taking off. Awards, residencies, prizes. Especially cash prizes. I was living at my parents home, one sick in an socially unacceptable way, and getting worse. And I was wasting my college degree toiling in a museum gift shop that paid me just enough to buy the gas to get there and back to the cage called home.
One day I heard from a friend that another friend had won a national writing competition with her first published short story. At the time I was sitting in my car in a freezing parking garage, reading a list of magazine rejections. My parent had just been admitted to a psychiatric facility. I’d just been rejected from the upteenth job that could have rescued me. And I read the first few pages of the short story and couldn’t finish the rest. It was great. Great in a way my stories were not. I cried.
When I got home and sat down to write, I wondered what the point of it was. I had always known, in the way I know the sun will rise and set, that expecting to get rich through writing had incredible odds. Yet, it wasn’t until circumstances had lifted me out of daily life to see the world turning that I realized I hadn’t really known it.
Martha Nussbaum, my favorite philosopher, once said, “Knowledge of a thing is not the same as experience of a thing.”
OK, I thought. If I’m never seen, never spoken to—if nobody reads my writing, if I never write something incredible, something that sees and speaks to someone, if all this came to nothing, and if I knew it would come to nothing, would I stop writing?
No.
Why?
IDK. What else would I do? I couldn’t come up with a better answer than another question. The fact is, there is nothing else that captivates me more than writing. There is nothing else that makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing than writing. I don’t have anything particular I want to say except whatever I feel like saying that day, and the causes and crusades I embark on pale in comparison to the fierce urge to tilt at the windmill called writing. I experience this every day when I sit down to write.
That was five years ago. What saved me was time and persistence. I got a new job, one which paid me enough to move out with a roommate. The parent got on a new medication, which worked. And also, the people who gave me references, and who sympathized with me with their own stories and helped me through it all. The sun rose and set dependably, as it always did.
And here we are again, completing another lap around the sun. Several spectacular things happened to me this year. I resold a story to an anthology. I got interviewed on a podcast. I got on TikTok and discovered that there was a form of social media that I wasn’t just good at, but also loved doing, and also had people who were happy to watch me sputter and clown about. Despite 12 years of writing every day, I never expected to be seen, let alone spoken to.
When I hesitantly named the awards that I wished to be nominated for, the editor told me, “I’ve already nominated you for those.”
I am excited to see what the next year brings.
