It’s time to reflect on the old year and plan for the new year.

2011 ushered in many changes in publishing. For me I stepped up my pace and produced more original fiction than I had in any previous years. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane and take a look at 2011.

Before we dive in, a few summary stats about 2011.

I wrote ~473,000 words of original fiction this year. That includes work on five novels and twenty-four stories.

My writing income increased 411% over 2010. Any doubts that publishing has changed? No. I’m real eager to see where it’s going to be in 2012!

January 2011

Back in January I was working on my first romance novel, a comedy titled Watching You Sleep about an insomniac comic bookstore-owner and a narcoleptic steampunk author finding true love. It was the first novel written as Kate N. Ryan and has been a big hit with readers. I also completed several short stories during the month, inspired by New Year’s goals.

February 2011

February was a good month. I finished Watching You Sleep and started a new novel, the second in the Dead Things series, Dreaming Dead Things. I also wrote the second in a series of four tie-in Dead Things stories. One of the stories, Love, [Unpronounceable] was the second Chrystal Eagle, starship plumber story.

March 2011

During March I mostly focused on Dreaming Dead Things, but I had been trying not to spend time tracking my progress. Result? Less progress! My experiment in staying on track without tracking anything didn’t turn out too well. Mostly I wasn’t getting any writing done. By the next month I realized I had to switch back to old habits if I wanted to finish the book.

April 2011

April turned it all around. I started tracking daily word count goals again and focused on getting a streak going that started on April 7th and ran a couple months until I stopped to focus on assignments for a workshop in June.

May 2011

May was a good month. I came into it riding a streak from April and soon finished Dreaming Dead Things. I followed it with another tie-in War of the Dead Things. After that I started my next novel, the first in the Poeville series, The Task of Auntie Dido.

June 2011

I came into June with my pace slowing on The Task of Auntie Dido as I spent more time preparing and reading material assigned for the Short Story Workshop I’d be attending that month with Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I finally realized that I didn’t have time to do both and took a break from the novel. I went to the workshop and had a fantastic time, learned a ton and came away with several great stories. I still have a couple stories that came out of that workshop to release, and I’m thinking of doing a ebook about the workshop, including workshop assignments and material from my notes.

July 2011

July was a strange month. I came back for a short time from the Short Story Workshop and continued working on The Task of Auntie Dido, but in a week I went back to Oregon to attend the Pitches & Blurbs workshop taught by Dean Wesley Smith. It hardly felt like I had left. And then when I got back from that I had a couple weeks before going to Cleveland for the Digapalooza conference and immediately after that I went to the PNLA conference in Spokane. All that traveling wasn’t great for my productivity.

August 2011

By August things started turning around. I finally finished writing The Task of Auntie Dido. I wrote a story “The Wind of Rushing Trees”, and I launched into the second book in my Goblin Alley series, The Eleven Lords. My word counts started increasing again.

September 2011

September was all about The Eleven Lords. Word counts continued to climb as I worked on the novel but I did get another story written, “The Thing in the Snow”.

October 2011

Word counts continued to climb and I decided to focus on kicking off a new writing streak, which started October 18th and has continued uninterrupted since then. I was still focused on The Eleven Lords, which would prove to be the longest single piece of fiction I’d written this year. Despite all the work I was doing on the novel I did add a couple more stories to the inventory, “Shore Leave” (a new Chrystal Eagle, starship plumber story) and “Oswald Hamilton, Invader”. I was starting to pick up steam.

November 2011

Starting November I took on a new 50,000+ word challenge, I was continuing my streak and I came up with the idea of releasing everything I was doing as a monthly magazine, giving readers a first uncensored, uncut look at what I was working on each month. That idea launched Exposed Monthly: Raw Creation! I finished writing The Eleven Lords, kicked off my new novel Land Lubbers: Cabin Boys and added three more stories to the inventory: “The Cracker Thief”, “Boldly, Sort Of” and “The Bug Builder”.

December 2011

And that brings us up to December. The final month of the year I kept my streak going, my 50,000 word challenge, and successfully launched the first issue of Exposed Monthly. I wrote a new story “Hauntlet” and very nearly (but not quite) finished writing my fifth novel of the year, Land Lubbers: Cabin Boys. I expect to finish it within the next week or so, but we’ll see.

I released a bunch of material in print and in e-book form, but I have a bunch of material in my inventory still to release. Of course now there’s Exposed Monthly, which collects what I’ve worked on each month. Like this article! And my current novels, stories and other material. It also features artwork created by me as I work to learn and improve my writing and art.

But I do plan to catch up on releasing the stories and books that haven’t had stand-alone releases yet. But that’s for the new year!

2011 was a good year. It got off to a slow start but finished out strong. I intend to continue my streak and 50,000 word challenges as well as putting out new issues of Exposed Monthly each month. I’m committed to running the magazine at least for twelve issues. It’ll be the first stop to see everything that I’ve been working on across all the various genres.

Looking forward to the New Year!