Accountability Posts, goals

I made my word count goal for the year, which was 500,000. YAY! GO ME!

Seriously. I’m very pleased with actually making my goal for the year.

When I count words, I count everything that I consider intended for public consumption. So in addition to the fiction, I count blog posts, Patreon essays, newsletters, etc. I don’t count email, or what I write up for web pages.

Here’s how the year broke down:

  • 1 business book (Improving Your Craft, which I still consider to be one of the better book I’ve ever done.)
  • 6 novels (Plus about a quarter of a novel that I didn’t finish but will get back to this year)
  • 19 short stories (I was kind of shocked by this number)
  • 24 newsletters
  • An essay every week, along with a Peek Behind the Curtain blog for Patreon (About 50 of each of these)
  • 20,000 words of other blogs

For a grand total of 500,176 words.

I was writing up to the end of the year. I didn’t have to do a lot, but I still had to write 23 words that last day to make my goal.

I’ll have another post about figuring out my word count goal for 2023, as there was a lot of thoughts and calculations and feelings involved in figuring it out.

In terms of email, I was really good for many months about cleaning out my inboxes. Then I fell off the wagon. However, what I was doing was probably the best, easiest thing I’ve ever done, and I’m going to start doing it again.

Namely: every time I open my email, I delete one item I no longer need. Just one.

The problem was that I’d gotten rid of so much fluff and things that were easy to delete I was down to the items that actually needed work done, and so because I was treating my email list as a to do list, it was taking me 30+ minutes to figure out all the parts I needed before I could delete the email.

I’m trying to be better about adding things to my TO DO list and removing them from my email, but sometimes that isn’t enough. However, of my four email accounts, two of them are clean. Last year at this time, only one of them was. So that’s progress, right?

In terms of steps/walking: I’m having some issues with my hips currently. This means I’m not trying to get in 10K steps. That would be stupid. Instead, my focus is on doing my PT exercises every day, so that by perhaps February, I can get back to doing lots of steps.

In terms of weight: yeah, I’ve gained a lot over this holiday season. Time to take it all off again, as well as to get back into keto.

Looking forward, I’ve started meditating again. I’ve chosen the Simple Habit app. I like the instructors and the content there. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I can already see the difference in my awareness.

I talked before about starting to craft again. Picked up this quilt again. Had finished about half of it before I put it down, just before my knee went out on me.

I had a few of my dad’s shirts that I wore to pieces. In order to keep them longer, I cut them up as material for this quilt.

There are other things that I’m doing moving forward, and I’m sure I’ll blather about them later.

In the meanwhile, have a lovely, lovely beginning to the year!