I love the quote, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” This year, I had an ambitious goal to accomplish something every month. I was wrapping up a few years of 10th Anniversary projects and wanted to get a head start on the next few years of projects. Some of these tasks were easier than others and some took a lot more work than I had expected. Ultimately, I’m proud of what I accomplished this year, so here’s how my initial January plan stacked up…
JANUARY/FEBRUARY: Releasing the complete, definitive edition of The Fluxion Trilogy wasn’t too difficult for the hardcover, paperback, and eBook versions. However, all the experience I gained from producing the first three audiobooks came to a head when I realized I needed to re-record a lot of what I had previously done the last few years. This set me back a bit as I had originally only expected that I needed to record the Appendix for this project. My workload doubled, but I’m much happier with the result. You can now get the full Fluxion Trilogy experience on Audible and iTunes.
MARCH: It surprised me how easy it was to create A+ Content on Amazon. I put together a little something for almost every book I’ve published. Of course, the biggest thing I could use to help market one of my books was how many awards my homemade ice cream cookbook garnered this year. Stop Screaming! ultimately won or placed in six literary contests. I flew out to New Jersey to accept one, drove up to Boulder to accept another, and now I have a healthy group of medals near my desk to remind me of my most successful work. This wasn’t the only bit of my writing that won an award this year, either. Kami’s Curse was a finalist for the Colorado Authors League Awards and I had a fun time in Denver with the other nominees and winners.
APRIL/SEPTEMBER: While my last children’s picture book, This is Not a Drill mostly used photographs, my latest children’s book, Bountiful Bunnies required me to hand-draw over 2,000 rabbits. It took a bit of work in April to figure out how I wanted the rabbits to look and how I wanted to arrange them on the pages, but I used the Camp NaNoWriMo event to break this big project down into smaller chunks. Still, drawing 100 rabbits a night was an endeavor that took many hours. I’m proud of the result that I released this September, but I learned my lesson. I’m having my next picture book, The $1,300 Alphabet illustrated by Nancy Anderson (pictured).
MAY/JUNE: Ironically enough, these two months did not go as planned. While I got Buried Colony and Stop Screaming! into a local bookstore, I realized that this has historically been more of a stressor for me. I decided to stick with what I was good at: focusing on direct sales at conventions. This decision was also aided because one of the local stores where I made most of my brick-and-mortar sales went out of business this year. Still, the Book Bash in May was an incredible event and I’m looking forward to participating again in 2025. As for expanded audiobook distribution, my initial plan got sidetracked because of controversy surrounding the services I was looking to use. There’s always some other time to explore other sales venues for my audiobooks, and it merely didn’t happen this year.
JULY/NOVEMBER: This year, I wanted a better first draft for NaNoWriMo. As such, I put forth the effort in July to do extensive world-building. However, neither of the books/series I was thinking of starting this year were what I ended up researching in July. Rift stuck out for me as the project I needed to do this year, and I’m really proud of the result—mostly because I actually planned this one out instead of just writing by the seat of my pants. Once November came around, though, the drama surrounding NaNoWriMo came to a head for me. This was my 15th year participating and 11th running the event for the Colorado Springs region. I have my reasons (noted in this year’s singular blog post), but I will not be returning to this organization in the future. It doesn’t mean I won’t write my first drafts in November (or any other month, for that matter), it just means I can do it myself. I still enjoy the community, though, and you can join my Discord server if writing is your thing.
AUGUST: While I spent a lot of August getting Bountiful Bunnies ready, I also submitted my back catalog to Readers’ Favorite to see if any of them would get 4- or 5-star reviews. Most weren’t picked up, which is fine. However, Be Fruitful… received a 5-star review! This seems fitting for this year, considering it was the conceptual basis for Bountiful Bunnies. You can check out the press release here. I also added a new task to August, which was to submit some short stories and poems to a few different contests and anthologies. Only one has so far made it the farthest, and I am still waiting to hear if “The Physics of Equus Monoceros” will be published soon.
OCTOBER: Of all the projects I gave myself this year, this one ended up being almost on par with completing the Fluxion Trilogy audiobook. Completing a full audit of my inventory was merely the first part. Once I realized I needed to dive deep into all the sales I’ve made in the last ~15 years, I had to improve my spreadsheet database and dive deep into finding the truth behind much of the data I had loosely accumulated over the years. Now that this system is squared away, I feel like I can more accurately track sales from now on.
DECEMBER: After fracturing a rib in November from a sledding accident, I determined I would forego my initial December task and take it easy. That’s not to say that December is completely devoid of accomplishments. It took 8 years, but tomorrow will mark a milestone for BMW the Critic. I will post my 1,000th review on December 11th. I still have many more reviews to post, but it feels weird that I’ve now written such a large number of them.
I’m glad that I pushed myself to get a lot of my writing hobby in order this year. I think it will serve me well for what I have planned for 2025—some of which has already started in 2024. Stay tuned for my planned projects when I post again in January.