What I did last year
These were my goals for 2014 -
Finish The Mirrors of Elangir and put it on sale by the end of June. (Done)
Plan and start writing the fourth and final book of The Barefoot Healer series. I hoped to have about 45,000 words of the first draft by the end of the year, which would be about a third of the book. I managed this, even though I was late starting.
Third time lucky - visit Dublin with Breda. (Not done. I think this is going to have to go on the bucket list.)
Upload at least ten minutes of edited video, not including any videos that promote my books. (Not done, though I started on a video of a trip on PS Waverley, the world's only remaining sea-going paddle steamer.)
Reduce the size of the TBR pile. As of 1st January 2014, I had 155 unread books on my Kindle. Today I have 110, though this is partly because I didn't buy as many books this year as in previous years.
A few other notable things I achieved that weren't on the radar back then -
In July, Death & Magic, the first book in The Barefoot Healer, was selected for inclusion on the Featured Story list at Wattpad. That means the site administrators think it's really good. It's since clocked up over 90,000 reads. (That's not quite as impressive as it sounds. A "read" on Wattpad is one user reading one chapter of a book. Since Death & Magic has 45 chapters, one user reading the whole book adds 45 reads to the total. And of course most of the reads will be on the first chapter, as people come across it and try to decide whether it's for them. Still, I'm pleased with the results.)
In October, I finally finished The Accidental Dragonrider, the short story about dragons that I've been muttering about ever since starting this blog. By the time it was done, it had become a novella.
In December, I attended the first Wattpad conference in London, where there were several good panel discussions about Wattpad specifically, and writing and publishing in general. Between the panels, there was time for chatting to the other participants. It was good to put faces to some people who'd so far been only words and humorous avatars on a screen.
According to Goodreads, I read 81 books this year. There were a few more I didn't add to the list here, particularly the existing books of The Barefoot Healer, which I re-read in preparation for starting the final book. I found a few plot holes and continuity errors that I didn't already know about, but to my relief found that something I'd thought would be quite a large plot hole wasn't.
So that's that. Overall, it's been a good year in terms of writing and reading. Come back in the next day or two to see what I want to do in 2015!
Finish The Mirrors of Elangir and put it on sale by the end of June. (Done)
Plan and start writing the fourth and final book of The Barefoot Healer series. I hoped to have about 45,000 words of the first draft by the end of the year, which would be about a third of the book. I managed this, even though I was late starting.
Third time lucky - visit Dublin with Breda. (Not done. I think this is going to have to go on the bucket list.)
Upload at least ten minutes of edited video, not including any videos that promote my books. (Not done, though I started on a video of a trip on PS Waverley, the world's only remaining sea-going paddle steamer.)
Reduce the size of the TBR pile. As of 1st January 2014, I had 155 unread books on my Kindle. Today I have 110, though this is partly because I didn't buy as many books this year as in previous years.
A few other notable things I achieved that weren't on the radar back then -
In July, Death & Magic, the first book in The Barefoot Healer, was selected for inclusion on the Featured Story list at Wattpad. That means the site administrators think it's really good. It's since clocked up over 90,000 reads. (That's not quite as impressive as it sounds. A "read" on Wattpad is one user reading one chapter of a book. Since Death & Magic has 45 chapters, one user reading the whole book adds 45 reads to the total. And of course most of the reads will be on the first chapter, as people come across it and try to decide whether it's for them. Still, I'm pleased with the results.)
In October, I finally finished The Accidental Dragonrider, the short story about dragons that I've been muttering about ever since starting this blog. By the time it was done, it had become a novella.
In December, I attended the first Wattpad conference in London, where there were several good panel discussions about Wattpad specifically, and writing and publishing in general. Between the panels, there was time for chatting to the other participants. It was good to put faces to some people who'd so far been only words and humorous avatars on a screen.
According to Goodreads, I read 81 books this year. There were a few more I didn't add to the list here, particularly the existing books of The Barefoot Healer, which I re-read in preparation for starting the final book. I found a few plot holes and continuity errors that I didn't already know about, but to my relief found that something I'd thought would be quite a large plot hole wasn't.
So that's that. Overall, it's been a good year in terms of writing and reading. Come back in the next day or two to see what I want to do in 2015!
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message 1:
by
Terry
(new)
Jan 01, 2015 12:48PM
Would like to hear about the Wattpad conference. Have heard a lot of pros and cons.
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One other noteworthy thing I did last year - I was invited to contribute
Escape Velocity
to a box set to raise money for Reading Is Fundamental, an American children's literacy charity. This was The Fates of Worlds, a set of seven full-length science fiction novels.I didn't mention it in my original post, because I was waiting to hear how many copies it sold and how much we raised. The figures are all in now, and I can report that it sold 360 copies and raised $242. (It was a limited edition, on sale for one month only.)
Our local newspaper was kind enough to run an article about my participation, which is here. I wish they'd used a different photo of me, as the one they chose makes me look like Gollum, but hey - no such thing as bad publicity.
