It’s the final month of the year already. Maybe it’s just me, but this year went by way too fast. I feel like I got a lot done, but there’s so much more I would have liked to accomplish. But that’s that type of stuff that should be reserved for a year-end post, not a month-end post.
So onto November…
This was a fun month. I didn’t write nearly as much fiction as I would have like too, but I had a handful of other accomplishments. I survived my first author fair / book signing at the Columbus Public Library and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity. If you missed my write-up of the event, you can click on over to my post about it and see what I did right, what I did wrong, and most importantly, what I learned from it.
And while sort of on topic, I had a couple of other cool things come up this month. I’m signed on as one of the featured authors at Six Corners of Nebraska in Bellevue in May, and perhaps even bigger than that, I’ll be giving a talk and signing books in April at Red Path Gallery & Tasting Room in Seward, NE. It’s just me going solo at that one, but wine will be involved, so fun times will be had for all.
Another cool thing that happened last month was that The Write Practice asked me to be a judge for their annual Winter Writing Contest. With $3000 in prizes, I’d say you should definitely look into that. Enrollment closes December 5 at 11:59, so get to it if you plan to sign up 🙂
As for other stuff…
Theme of Absence
November was a mixed month, I suppose. Traffic was down just over 7% from the previous month, but I could attribute that to the jump I got in October for the Halloween Contest. But it was also down about .5% from last November, so who knows? But on the flip side, I received 20 submissions, which is about normal, and also qualified for Duotrope.com‘s Most Personable Markets Listing, while remaining on their Most Approachable Markets list. So it’s not a bad month for the site at all.
Short stories
Onto my own stuff, this month wasn’t so kind to me where real writing was concerned. It didn’t help that I had set aside a three way weekend to write, but then ended up spending that entire time sick. Anyhow, here’s how it looked for short story submissions:
- Number of submissions: 1 (One? Well, to be fair, I…eh, screw it.)
- Number of rejections: 0 (Wooo! Yay me!)
- Number of acceptances: 0 (Why am I even writing this stuff down this month??)
- Number still pending: 7, with one shortlist. (I guess that’s not so bad.)
WIP Novel
Uh, speaking of being bad, I barely worked on my current WIP at all this month. Not good at all. I’m going to remedy that in December. I did something I probably shouldn’t have instead; I started a fairly detailed outline of an epic fantasy series (I used to call this a trilogy, but it’s starting to look more like four books now.) Now what is that bad? Because I need to get another dang book published, that’s why. The trilogy (or whatever the equivalent word for four books is) can must wait until I’m querying agents for the next stand-alone YA novel. So if you ever catch me talking about this fantasy series I have in my head, dork smack me and remind me what my priorities need to be.
Goals
My goals for December are simple. Here’s the priority list:
- Maintain a posting schedule here of 4-5 times each week. This is my biggest priority at this point, as I want to continue building this blog. Traffic and subscribers are at all time highs as I close out the second year of this blog. And thanks for that, by the way!
- Write, at minimum 10,000 words in the new novel. I don’t do well with daily word count goals, as I’ve said before, but this small monthly on is not only possible, but necessary. You know, writers do tend to actually write sometimes.
- Finish a new short story. What the heck? If I hit my 10,000 words for the month, why not celebrate with something fun.
That does it for the month. November was fun. I hope December is great for you and me and everybody else. Have a great one!
What are your goals for the month? Feel free to leave a comment and let us know!
