January 2022 Wrap-Up

So back in the day, like October 2016 back in the day, I used to do a monthly wrap-up post where I talked about what I accomplished that month and what I hoped to do in the next month. I have decided to start doing that again because

a) I think seeing my progress will be good for me (even if it’s a lack of progress sometimes)

b) it’s an easy place to put up book reviews without doing a book review

c) I can talk a bit about things I’ve been doing behind the scenes that are not interesting enough to warrant their own post

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Reading

I set out to read about 8-9 books this month since my yearly goal is 100 books, and I ended up reading 10 books in January. (The numbers beside the titles are where they are in the series, if there is one)

1. Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque (4 stars- helped a lot with shifting my feelings about my newsletter)
2. How to Read a Suit by Lydia Edwards (4 stars- highly interesting if you want to learn more about period specific clothing as well as masculinity)
3. Where the Drowned Girls Go (#7) by Seanan McGuire (5 stars- absolutely LOVE this series, YA portal fantasy)
4. Heartstopper (#4) by Alice Oseman (5 stars- the focus of this one was heavily on mental health and I loved that love couldn’t solve/magically fix it)
5. The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows (#2) by Olivia Waite (4 stars- this series is f/f historical romance, and this one features a beekeeper and has tons of queer side characters)
6. Winter’s Dawn (#3) by Arden Powell (4 stars- every novella in this series has been magical and wonderful)
7. The Missing Page (#2) by Cat Sebastian (5 stars- Page and Sommers team up to solve Sommers’ cousin’s disappearance from 20 years ago, fantastic)
8. Boys Run the Riot (#4) by Keito Gaku (4 stars- a manga with a trans lead about fashion, mad it’s over)
9. The Excalibur Curse (#3) by Kiersten White (4 stars- I am so upset this series is over but it was a fabulous King Arthur retelling filled with queer characters)
10. Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel by Hallie Ephron (5 stars- very useful as a I work on The Reanimator’s Heart)

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Admin/Behind the Scenes Author Stuff

• Updated the back matter and formatting for the ebook versions of all my books
• Republished said books on Amazon and D2D
• Published all of my books on the Google Play store
• Fixed my website aesthetically to make it pretty again after I wrecked it last year
• Updated every page of my website to be current
• Created, uploaded, and published the second box set in the Ingenious Mechanical Devices series, which contains books 4-6 (Dead Magic, Selkie Cove, and The Wolf Witch)
• Updated the covers/titles for the audiobooks for The Earl of Brass and The Gentleman Devil
• Contacted/contracted a narrator for the audiobook of Kinship and Kindness (which will hopefully be out by summer. PS- my narrator is trans, and I’m super excited to have a trans narrator for a series that has a trans lead in each book)
• Fixed/relaunched my monthly newsletter (You can read January’s here)
• Read some author craft books (Newsletter Ninja and Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel)
• blogged weekly and did weekly marketing

I did a lot of admin stuff this month, but I want to emphasize that I didn’t start teaching until over halfway through the month, so I got a lot of work done while on break. Please don’t judge my productivity against yours if you are working full-time. Due to pandemic mess, I’m teaching less classes and trying to make up for it by [theoretically] boosting my author income. Hence, all the admin stuff.

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Blogs Posted

• How I’m Getting My Shit Together
• On Doing Things Wrong as an Author
• All of My Books are Now Available on Google Play
• Why Authors Need Other Hobbies
• How to Outline as a Pantser
• January 2022 Wrap-Up

If there’s ever anything you want me to write about, feel free to let me know. I will never complain about blog suggestions.

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Writing

Oh boy. So this is where I find myself cringing because while I look very industrious in all the things I mentioned above, I did not get a whole lot of writing done. This month The Reanimator’s Heart reached about 11,000 words. This was due to multiple reasons. Part of it was that I had to tweak the beginning of my book to make it work, which then created a cascade of tweaking. Most of it was due to stress though. I had bad anxiety at the beginning of the month, which led to a horrible bout of writer resistance. I can’t even pinpoint why, but I was struggling. I also had car issues, a dog with diarrhea, and my classes started up again all within a two week period. As soon as I get stressed out, my ability to write plummets. It’s something I’m working on, but it still throws me. My hope is that, while I probably won’t catch up completely in February, I will make a dent in my word count goal and actually get close to where I hoped to be.

I also figured out that I do significantly better doing 20 minute writing sprints than 15 minute ones, so here’s hoping that I can use that new information to build momentum going forward.

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Hopes for February

• Read 8 books
• Write 20k words (stretch goal is 30k to fully catch up)
• finish a syllabus I need to write for a future class
• finish a course proposal for a future class
• blog weekly, February author newsletter
• crochet more because I barely crocheted at all this month

That’s it for this month’s wrap-up. Let me know what goals you hope to achieve in February!