Happy New Year! I hope your Christmas season was excellent as well.

Thank you for being here, and thank you for your support over this last year. Things haven’t moved nearly as quickly as I would have liked, but I’m still glad that things are moving. Once again, I want to take some time to review and make some goals going forward.

2024 In Review

Let’s start with last year’s goals.

Write 30 Minutes Daily

I would give myself a B– on this one. There were some days where I could have written, but I didn’t (for whatever reason), and there were other days where family responsibilities took priority; I failed to perfectly hit this goal, but I do think I meaningfully worked toward it.

After all, I did write far, far more than I would have without this goal. I wrote approximately 200,000 words (in my primary novel project, Halfwhisker) over the course of 365 days, or north of 500 words per day, which is a decent pace—particularly considering that, in reality, I only wrote Mondays through Fridays, and I took time off for holidays and illnesses and such. I’m not done with draft 1 of Halfwhisker (which is looking increasingly like it will be published as two or three novels, rather than one giant doorstopper), but I’m getting there.

Not included in the above numbers are blog posts and other projects, such as time and word count put into the Visions of the Future article that I’ll finish… eventually. Family stuff takes first priority, then novel writing, then side stuff, so there’s rarely a lot of time each week for that writing, but I often squeeze a little in.

Publish Inner Demon (Including Audio, Etc)

This one is a little embarrassing. I finished Inner Demon last year. The manuscript is done and polished. All I needed to do was get a cover and format the guts of the book, and then at the bare minimum the ebook could have gone live. Then I could have started on the audiobook.

I took too long to get started with a cover artist. I decided to finish the rough draft of Halfwhisker before I did anything for the final publishing process of Inner Demon, and that didn’t prove to be the most efficient way to schedule out my time. I should have overlapped the two activities. By the time I started reaching out to cover artists in December, it was way too late for me to realistically self-publish that month. Considering my cover artist is going to be back in school soon, it may be too late for me to self-publish January! We’ll see.

Lesson learned here: plan my time better, and overlap activities that can be overlapped.

Blog Updates

I was eventually forced to drop weekly updates to the blog (late in the year), but it appears that my actual goal was to post an update here “most weeks,” which I did.

I also had the goal to publish a short story to the blog once per year, and to write an additional article and post it on the blog in 2024… In hindsight, those didn’t need to be high-priority goals, and they didn’t end up getting treated that way, but I’m still surprised I thought I would have the time.

I guess I did end up posting a new short story to the blog—The Courage in a Small Heart. No new article, though.

Kickstarter

Last year, I wanted to run a “successful” Kickstarter. By that I meant I would hit my funding goals and be able to produce a book with a nicer build quality, and more art, than I would be able to do if the book were entirely self-funded. I wanted Halfwhisker to be that book. I thought that I would start the Kickstarter before finishing the book.

This was my biggest goal, the one I was most excited for—and I haven’t even begun to lay the groundwork for this goal.

That said, I’m not too annoyed. I’d rather have the book be good than rushed. I’m also really surprised with me of a year ago—putting something on Kickstarter that wasn’t finished? I mean, other people do it, but I don’t want to be one of those people. If I Kickstart a book, it better at least be in the final draft. The stuff I can’t do myself—like the art—doesn’t need to be finalized at the start of the Kickstarter, as one of the purposes of the Kickstarter would be to help pay for the art. In my mind that’s worth the risk, as the book would still be written and good whether the art gets funded or not.

Other

And those were the goals of last year. Not a track record that I’m too stocked about, but I was swinging for the fences just to learn what I was capable of hitting. This year, I think, I’ll be able to set SMARTer goals.

2025 Going Forward

I’m going to keep my goal list simpler and shorter than last year, but still impactful.

Writing Productivity

I still want to write a minimum of 30 minutes each day, Monday through Friday, in whatever my primary project is—Halfwhisker, currently. I will allow this time to be used for audio recording, or other necessary business aspects of self-publishing, if I’m at that stage with a book, but I’d rather do such things on weekends or when I have extra time. That said, I can’t get my work out there and get known if I don’t actually self-publish, and this is the time I have, so I’ll make it work.

For context, I want 30 minutes of writing to translate to at least 500 words. I’m not setting a word count goal specifically, but when I say a minimum of 30 minutes of writing a day, I’m expecting no less than 500 words a day, most days.

Publishing

I’m going to self-publish Halfwhisker by or before the end of 2025. I would like to do so via Kickstarter so that, if successful, I can include more art in the book. I’m willing to push this back a little into next year if that’s what will make for a successful, quality book delivery.

I also will have Inner Demon entirely self-published, audiobook included, by or before the end of March.

Finally, after I finish draft 1 of Halfwhisker I want to convert The Courage in a Small Heart into a graphic novel script. I’m not setting specific goals for when I want the script done, and whether or not it’s possible to have a finished, short graphic novel by the end of the year; this is a tertiary project, but it is on my mind.

Send-off