As 2019 comes to a close I wanted to take a look back at everything I accomplished this year. This was the first time I used a time keeper to keep track of the time I spent on writing related activities and for 2019 I spent 420 hours working on my writing. Since I’m a data nerd, here’s the break down of where my time went this year.
Even though I didn’t complete everything I set out to do in the beginning of the year I still accomplished a lot this year. I got Family Binds out in the world which required a complete rewrite and a few rounds of editing that happened in the first half of this year. If you haven’t read Family Binds yet it’s an emotionally raw book that challenged me in ways Crystal and Flint didn’t and I’m extremely proud of how it turned out.
Once Family Binds was done, I moved on to the rewrite of book 3 in The Journey Missions Series, Thicker Than Blood. I had completed the first draft of this book during NaNo in 2018 and it was mess. It was probably the biggest dumper fire of a first draft I had ever written. I ended up having to throw a large portion of it out and added a lot of new scenes while rewriting it this year. It’s currently with some beta readers and I’m looking forward to getting back to it in the new year. My plan is to have this book out in the world in the first half of 2020 so you can all find out what happens when the crew is sent to Earth.
In between Journey books I spent time working on my eco terrorist novel Cleansing Rain until the characters started to demand my full attention and I completed the first draft of this book during NaNo. This story has kind of taken on a life of its own. What was supposed to be a stand-alone novel has now grown to be at least two if not three books. This book will need a lot of editing and rewriting next year and I’m still going back and forth on whether I want to indie publish it or give traditional publishing another shot. Either way I expect to spend some time with Zoe, Cole, Ian, Blake, and Iris next year getting Cleansing Rain ready to enter the world on way or the other.
2019 was a good year for me and I’m hoping to accomplish even more in 2020. I’m just starting to put together my plan for next year but here’s some highlights.
-Publish Thicker Than Blood
-Maybe Publish Book 4 of the Journey Missions. I’ve just started writing the first draft so this one might be a stretch but I’m going to push to it as close to publication ready as possible.
-Revise Cleansing Rain and determine publication route.
-Write first draft for final book in The Journey Missions Series.
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