Writing review: Resolutions 2012

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I’ve done quite well in keeping to my writing resolutions this past month, but I haven’t been as successful as I might have been. I didn’t really get started until some days into January and I didn’t start keeping a log until the beginning of the second week. (Yes, I’ve been keeping a log in a spreadsheet!)

Writing resolutions 2012

My primary resolution was to write for at least two hours every day, and that I seem to have kept. To be sure I missed one or two days. But I seem to have worked for about four hours every day between the 9th and 29th January. My best day was Tuesday the 17th when I wrote for nearly 7 hours. On average I’ve written around 1400 words each day. If, that is, I counting not just the words I’ve written creatively, but also everything I’ve written as translation work, for my blog, and in letters and tweets. I don’t think this is cheating. (He said, crossing his fingers. All my writing is creative of course. :-))

My writing resolutions also included producing about 10,000 words for Elin’s Story. Sadly I only managed half of that. Though my most productive day for creative writing was Tuesday 24th, when I wrote nearly 2700 words. Of which 2350 for Elin.

I was also supposed to write a complete short story, and to submit a short story to a market somewhere, this in order to live up to my commitment to the W1S1 project. Well, I started writing a short story and I managed to write 900 odd words for it, but I haven’t completed it yet. As for submitting a story. I have one to send but the mental threshold of making it ready and putting it in an stamped , addressed envelope turned out to be rather high. I shall grit my teeth and send it off this month.

Grey area

I did write a couple of articles (about 1800 words) and submit them together with a pitch to an online magazine. If they’re accepted then I have a market for, say, another 15 articles of about 500 words each submitted over the next five months. I don’t know whether web journalism really counts as story writing though; grey area maybe. About 6000 of the words I wrote were teaching material for Mera Förlag, so something I will get paid for. Eventually. It would be nice to be paid for everything I wrote. But I’m grateful to have a small income at least for some of my writing.

I also resolved to try and publish at least one blog entry every week. I’ve managed to keep this resolution though it hasn’t been as easy as I had anticipated. I’m really not terribly satisfied with a couple of the blog entries I published in January. One (Resolutions) is the truncated remnants of a podcast script four times as long that I spent hours writing but eventually had to abandon. It was a disappointment, but I was right to abandon it. I was letting it take up far too much time and it wasn’t going anywhere.

Well, that’s my review of my writing in January. As I say, not as outstanding as I could have wished, but not a complete failure either. I’m hopeful I will be able to do better in February.

Resolutions 2012: A Quill pen

This entry also posted on my blog at the Written Word Ning. [This link is no longer active.]

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