2024 Retrospective and Goals for 2025

I had one definite goal for this year (finish The Last Dragonrider) and one "stretch" goal (publish another audiobook). I didn't achieve either of them, though The Last Dragonrider is getting there. I wrote 61,000 words of it this year, so it now stands at 128,000 words. I'm going to blame the day job for this. I spent several months working long hours on work required by company policies that I don't think benefits our customers or users. There were many days (or nights) when I closed the work laptop and was just too exhausted to spend any time with my characters.

So I'm scaling back my plans for next year, in the hope of beating the targets for once. The goals are: publish (not finish) The Last Dragonrider and publish another audiobook.

I achieved a few things that weren't on the list:

- I published a video of my 2023 talk at Urban Arts. I spoke about my writing process and career as an author, and read from some of my stories.

- In August, I did another talk at Urban Arts, similar to the 2023 one but with different readings. There's video of this one too, but I haven't got around to editing it.

- In November, Readers' Magnet published an article that I wrote about The Accidental Dragonrider.

- I wrote another five short stories, totalling about 9,000 words. None of them are published yet (I'm saving them up until I have enough to justify releasing another book), but sometimes I post readings to my Facebook author page or my YouTube channel.