2018 wrap-up

Do Authors Have To Care About SEO?
Women of Game of Thrones Panel at GeekGirlCon 2018

2018 had been one hell of a wild ride. I became a manager at work, which is still new and a little terrifying. I went back to practicing a sport I used to love, and promptly screwed my leg up so bad I still can’t walk right. I was a panelist at a convention and I didn’t completely embarrass myself onstage. I wrote a draft of a novel that may actually be worth publishing. I started a true crime podcast. I got three root canals. I had to cancel my honeymoon again. My mom, who was going to die by March according to the hospice nurse, is still alive and… not thriving, not by a long shot, but hanging in there.

I didn’t manage to get back into the swing of tracking my daily word count, but I do have a breakdown of words I produced overall. I wrote a lot of fiction in 2018–over 150,000 words of it, which is the highest word count I’ve ever managed in a single year. By project:

52,851 on Astra Nullius. I think some of those stories may have to be revised in 2019, but overall I’m pleased with the fact that I’ve raised the stakes for our heroes.

20,411 on an Astra Nullius side project that will probably never be finished, at least not in its current form. I still like the idea, but I’m going to have to scrap what I’ve got and totally rewrite it.

41,017 on a near-future novel about a private investigator and his android client I’m hoping to finish and self-publish in 2019.

28,182 on a sequel to that novel, all written during National Novel Writing Month. This one isn’t anywhere close to a complete draft, but it’s an interesting story I want to keep working on.

8,028 on miscellaneous character studies and other short stories that will probably never be completed, but helped me get the clarity I needed to finish other projects.

That’s not counting a few thousand words of podcast scripts for Criminal Records, blog posts, or any other non-fiction I completed this year.

My goal for 2019 is moving more of my projects toward a stage where they feel polished enough to promote. I’d really love to get that novel completed and published on Amazon KDP, and I’m also going to be making some much-needed tweaks to Astra Nullius (like: cleaning up an old issue with pronouns in the Xrrt chapters, fixing the abrupt endings of Worst Contact and Trust Me, getting a fresh set of eyes in to do some proofreading, and so on).

Do Authors Have To Care About SEO?
Women of Game of Thrones Panel at GeekGirlCon 2018