If you are regular reader of this blog, you'll notice I haven't been posting a lot. Not much to say, to be honest, since I'm focusing on working on the different projects I have looming over me. It got a bit complicated since I didn't have a laptop for all of December and a large hunk of November, not to mention a death in the family and two rounds of plague.

Looking back, 2012 was not a good year for me when it comes to writing and programming. I wrote a lot, but it didn't feel like I made much forward progress. I had only one thing published, a gratis story for a fund raiser for diabetes, and that's it. I did post Casting Call, but I can't say it was a resounding success. There were high points and low, but I can't even say it was a "building" year.

Serial

The biggest project was my serial. I've hit 442k words over the last 70 weeks and managed to keep a steady stream of 6k words a week up to this point. I burned out three times over the year, but managed to make double posts to keep up with the one week a chapter average.

If we use comments and conversations as a measure, I had 913 comments on 66 chapters. I also had someone do a full-size, watercolor painting of the main character for one of the chapters. I'm still pretty excited about that.

The serial also sucked out pretty much all my time for the year.

Novel

I started and finished a novel set in the same world as FOTS. I'm pretty proud of it and I'm planning on submitting it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest later this month. Otherwise, it is going through a few rounds of edit and then being set aside until I can afford to get it edited.

Stories

I wrote only seven stories this year, five were commissions and one was Casting Call. Normally, I've written a lot more at this point, but the stories just didn't come.

Output

When it comes to just writing, the process of putting words down on the computer, I had probably one of the most productive years ever.

This is the first time I've ever written over half a million words. But, you can tell where most of my work went into:

One thing was hammered in pretty hard this year: writing output doesn't correlate to much.

Commissions

This last year, I also stopped most commissions. Commissions have pretty much been the only income I got from writing, but it was erratic and I felt it was limiting me. I still have a few commissions to work on, mostly from trusted commissioners and good friends, but otherwise I think I need to focus on a different type of writing in 2013.

Making eBooks

I also helped a small publishing company for the better part of a year creating books for the Amazon bookstore. Unfortunately, they were sold to another company and I was pretty much told that I won't be doing that anymore. I did get a pretty nice build system for creating ebooks for PDF, EPUB, and Mobi out of it, so I don't consider it a loss.

Looking forward

I honestly don't know what 2013 is going to be. I have a few projects that are still being finished (BAM, a commission, and the serial), but otherwise, I'm pretty much at a loss. At the moment, I'm just going to focus on the three things that need to get done and see how the year turns out.