New Year's Resolutions

It’s 2008, 19 days in and I shall now record my new year’s resolutions for posterity, or prosperity, or, if I should be so lucky, for both.

This year, I shall achieve the following:

• complete the first draft of my novel (another 80,000+ words)
• write nine (original) short stories (in addition to Iris)
• submit Iris to the Alan Marshall Short Story Award (due Feb 22^nd)
• submit five short stories to competitions.
• enter The Age short story competition (with the best of the ten)
• attend ‘Writers at the Convent’
• read 60 (fiction) books (and blog-review every one of them)
• read 10 (non fiction) books

In case I start thinking this is unachievable, let’s reflect on last year.

Last year I achieved the following:

• wrote 40,000 words (30%) of my novel (including outlining and research)
• completed two original short stories (2000 words each). One is ‘Iris’.
• completed two fan-fiction novellas (one at 22,000 words and another at 28,000)
• completed four short stories (fan-fiction) (3 x 1,500 words and another at 5,000)
• wrote 35,000 words of an incomplete fan-fiction story.
• wrote around 10,000 words of additional material (drafts, excluded scenes etc).
• blog-reviewed many of the books I read.
  

That’s about 150,000 words for 2007, excluding blog entries which in themselves are a form of creative writing. Averaged across the year, that gives me 400 words per day. Wow. That’s surprising given that there were times when I wrote nothing for up to three weeks at a time.

On the reading side of things, I read 30 novels. I also read some non-fiction, some journal articles, newspaper articles (my new form of procrastination), fan-fiction and blog entries, but I don’t count any of that. Isn’t it any wonder I have sore eyes!?

For the novels alone, that’s about 8,700 pages, according to Anobii.com’s calculations, which (at an average of 250 words per page) is 2,175,000 words. Steven Barnes suggests that for every 1,000 words a writer writes, they should have read 10,000. Surprisingly, my stats look pretty good there.

So, if I boost my reading to 60 books a year (double what I did last year), then I should be pumping out 1,000 words a day. Admittedly, this is what Steven Barnes suggests and I’ve always considered it an impossible dream… yet, it seems I’m halfway there. Of course, none of this would have been possible without Em who cajoles, encourages, threatens and inspires me into putting my butt into the chair when I'd much prefer to watch television or stare at drying paint. I only hope I can do the same for her.