New Year, More Words · 12:57pm January 4th
Hi!
I don't normally do blogs around here for a variety of reasons but now is as good a time to start as any. I guess this blog is a sort of way to keep myself accountable in a more public way, even if no one may actually read this. Still, I wanted to share some of what's going on and my plans for this year, and I hope some people enjoy reading this!
The Financial Things
So that leads me to the next part of this blog. What am I working on this year? Well, I already said that I'm working on commissions still. They're currently the best way for me to make an income, but I also plan on fully opening up my Ko-Fi and opening up a Patreon.
So, y'know, here's my Ko-Fi and my Patreon. Both are fairly barebones, just being basic support stuff, but I do plan to expand them in the future once I start pumping out of my own more frequently.
Productivity and Numbers
As some of my friends and other people know, I keep track of my word count through the year with a word count tracker. I started with one made by Christie Yant back in 2022, then I made my own last year, with a slightly different layout and to make my own charts to help keep me working on making the numbers go up. It worked fairly well, though there were plenty of months that I kinda fell behind. I have screenshots below to show what I mean (Embedding wasn't working, no idea why)
As you can see, there's a lot of days with 0 in there, but also a lot of more productive days and weeks. It definitely trended better toward the end of the year, too, with more big days. My last 3 months were actually my most productive!
So, what does that mean going into 2024? Well, it gives me at least two main goals: Continue writing even more, and to write more consistently. My goal is to try and reach around 15,000 words a week which does sound like a lot, but when you see those last few weeks of 2023 that doesn't seem too difficult to do. That's 3,000 words a day if I only write on weekdays. Definitely not impossible.
To help me with this, I've made a new word tracker that I am very proud of. And I figured I may as well share it for people that want it. Beware that it works best in libreoffice, so the charts and some of the fancy formatting might break in Excel or Google Sheets. However, all the values and sums still work fairly well outside of LibreOffice from what I found.
Examples of the tracker in use!
Projects and Personal Goals
This is fairly simple. I have three other goals I want to achieve this year.
The first is I want to do that regular "monthly check in" thing other folks do. I don't always expect people to read them, but it will serve me well to have some record of how I'm currently doing. I always get a little kick back into gear when I shared my stats last year, making me extra productive for a short period of time. I figure regularly doing so this year will help a lot. Basically sharing some of my progress, my stats, what it is I'm currently doing. That sort of stuff.
Second thing I want to do is generally work on publishing more stuff that isn't commission work, as well as finding other places to publish. That's something I've been struggling with a little (and I generally avoid publishing commissioned stuff on Offprint). This includes more fanfiction, but also original content too.
Lastly, I very much want to actually get a book written this year. A proper, original novel. No idea if that's going to work out in the next 12 months, but I'm sure I can get something done. I have, after all, written an entire novel length fanfic for someone else, with some hefty unpublished things sitting around. I'll keep you posted on that front.
So. There it is. A first big, proper blog. Very stream of consciousness, honestly, but I will end up revising all this later in future updates.
Publishing a book is a big thing, if you want to ask questions on that, let me know. I know a few things and I'm excited to see where you go from here.
These charts are tickling the statistics nerd part of my brain! Would you be willing to share the template?
5762277
I linked it in the post! But here it is again :)
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rgsh4s22q19z5n3fh9g5t/Ashley-Noble-s-Word-Count-Tracker-2024-Template-v1.2.ods?rlkey=j75l74bd6tpiehtntw3snv0vn&dl=0
I did a lot of the charts because it's cool seeing the results I get. I loved tweaking it to get what I wanted, and stuff like that last year helped me push myself a little harder at times!
5762286 I got so distracted by the pretty charts I missed the link
Thank you for making this! Such a cool resource