2015 saw me finally get back into my writing stride–sort of. When I look back at my spreadsheet, I see lots of months with daily average wordcounts below 500. When I look into the months, there are far too many days where I wrote nothing. But still, somehow, I made my wordcount goal–185,000 words. Not a huge amount, given that there are many people out there who regularly get over 500,000, or even a million, but it was a good goal for me. The same number of words I wrote in the last year before my husband passed away and life kind of went off the rails.

So not bad. 🙂

This year, I’m going to bump that up a little bit. Not much, just to 215,000, but the goal is to set the bar just a little farther than I know I can reach. My actual wordcount for 2015 was 202,000, so the new goal seems reasonable. I’m also going to plot a lot more. I think I’m getting the hang of it, although I’m still a total amateur, but it worked really well for Flesh Market, and seems to be working for Worship the Moon.

My specific bookwriting plans for this year are to finish Moon and Alpha Squirrel, which have already been started. Then I need to start from scratch with Proud Flesh (Bodies and Souls 2) and The Wall Nuts (Nutty Romances 3). Once those are done, there’s the third Bodies and Souls, and a third Witches and Wolves, neither of which have permanent names yet, though B&S 3 is going under the project name Weregild. And somewhere in there, I want to finish off the second world fantasy The Emperor’s Favorite, and lay out the plot for a goofy Halloween story about a guy who inherits a rundown German castle from a dead friend, who then shows up with all his ghost buddies. Hijinks ensue. 🙂

As for immediate stuff? The Seven Days of Squirrel start tomorrow, wherein I shall bombard you with pictures and memes of squirrels doing weird things that make me laugh, in honor of Nathan’s and Vince’s re-release into the wild on Thursday.

So that’s it for me. What do you plan to do differently this year? Where are you going to stretch or redirect yourself? What personal bests are you going to leave behind in the dust?

It’s getting late here now and I can hear my pillow calling to me. Good night, sweet dreams, and I wish you a squirrely New Year.