My Writing Year in Review

My Writing Year in Review.

Okay, I am into stats, so here’s a few writing numbers for 2012.

·         Last year I wrote, at least according to my daily word counts, 117,649 words, which is an average of 321 words a day.
·         I wrote on every day of the year, so my output on many days was very little.
·         I wrote and submitted ten articles to the DiVine website of which nine were posted on the site.
·         I blogged at least once a week.
·         The novel I am writing grew to 166,000 words.
·         I critiqued/edited a non-fiction book and critiqued a couple of short stories.

Not that impressive.

My Writing Aspirations for 2013.

This year is going to be one of primarily editing/rewriting.  I plan to write and edit every day and:

·         Finish the novel I am writing. I still reckon there are another 10,000 to 20,000 words to go.
·         Edit/rewrite Stalking Tigers, a novel I was halfway through the second draft of when I got distracted by a beaut idea for a novella. Once Stalking Tigers is rewritten I will get it critiqued.
·         Edit/rewrite that 17,000 word novella and get it critiqued.
·         And then come back to the current novel and edit/rewrite it and find some really good friends who like really long novels to critique it.
·         And towards the end of the year I hope to begin a new novel in National Novel Writing Month.
·         I will continue to blog once a week at least.
·         I hope to critique a lot more, some longer short stories, maybe a novel.
·         I want to fix up my website and get a stronger presence on Twitter so I don’t have to rely on the ever changing Facebook to promote myself.
·         You may have noticed I left out Divine. It is in a state of flux at the moment and I am waiting to see what form it takes this year.

Changes to Facebook

I only recently learnt that Facebook has changed who sees status updates. The updates are now not sent to all friends, just those selected by a Facebook algorithm. This was done by Facebook in the hope that we will pay them to promote our status updates. I am not sure how this affects my author page. I don’t know whether my author page members all receive my blog and Divine article notifications.

The Facebook changes make it clear that I would be a fool to rely on Facebook to promote myself and my writing. So this year I plan to use Twitter more frequently and hopefully effectively as well as Google plus. The same goes for my website, which I need to revamp. I also plan to run my blog on both Blogger and Wordpress to see which gets more hits.

Not an overly ambitious year, but hopefully it is one where I act like I want to be a successful writer.  

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