Published: 2024-01-04T00:00:00.000+00:00
Edited: 2024-01-04T00:00:00.000+00:00
Status: 🌲evergreen

2023 Round up and future plans

Reading time: 2 minutes

The new year is traditionally a time to take stock of the last twelve months, and plan for the year ahead. As much as I hate New Year's Resolutions, (they activate my demand avoidance) I still find it a useful exercise. So, what did my 2023 as a writer look like?

I managed to write 48,000 words, which is far from my best yearly word count ever, but it almost three times what I managed in 2022. So that's progress.

Around 6000 words of that was on Roar of the Flame as I managed to get back to work on what is proving to be my most problematic novel yet. I can't even put my finger on why, but boy is Bazrad giving me a hard time with this one.

I wrote 9000 words worth of short stories, four of which are finished, one of which I want to do more work on. All of which are likely to find their wary to a Patreon near you!

Sadly, I didn't manage to publish anything in 2023, despite my best efforts. Which means that How to Say "I Love You" In Binary and The Romance Novella I Keep Changing The Name Of are still on the shelf, waiting for me to publish. As a result of The Great Cataloguing I also have two poetry collections that need a little spit and polish before setting them loose in the world. I am hoping to publish all four sometime this year, landlords willing.

My primary aim for 2024 is to get Roar of the Flames finished and published, though I am wary of making any promises on that. I've done it before, and life has conspired to make me break it. I'm honestly not sure what I plan to do once it's finished. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

There are also plans in the works for my website. I alluded to this in a previous post. The gist of it is that I want to move away from WordPress to a self-hosted static website. Which I believe will work better for me and incidentally will be a couple of hundred quid a year cheaper for me. Right now, I'm paying for something that just isn't serving my needs, and hasn't for some time. I plan to do a bit of cosmetic tweaking when this happens, so the change over should certainly be noticeable. Not least because I can't take my current WordPress theme with me.

In non-writing news, I plan to get even more involved in my local community. When we moved to Glasgow in July, my little family unit got involved with Living Rent, a tenant's union looking out for the rights of my fellow renters. In the six months since, we've successfully campaigned to get Glasgow City Council to fix a pair of sinkholes in the pavement, and forced a housing company not to make 1400 refugees homeless for Christmas. I plan to get even more involved in the union in 2024, because making a genuine, visible difference in my local community has been a breath of fresh air after so many years of increasing hopelessness.

And maybe, just maybe, 2024 will be the year we manage to bring a canine addition into the family.

Other than that, I'm mostly not making any promises and just seeing how 2024 goes.