A 2022 Writing Year in Review

Strap in. This is gonna be a long one.

January Writing Challenge

For January 2022, I gave myself the challenge of writing a new flash fiction story for each day of the month. That was it. At that point, I had no goals for the rest of the year, only practicing my flash fiction. They were each to follow a central theme so that they might be publishable as a single collection someday if I made it that far.

The original goal was for each one to be 500 words, or about a full page, depending on formatting. The theme of the month was “Mother”, so they had to either be about a mother, about the absence of the mother, or about some other aspect of motherhood. An unspoken part of the challenge was to try writing these stories in as many different genres or settings and different relationship types within the theme as I possibly could.

Some days, I had no inspiration and was unable to complete a story. On other days, I made up for that by pushing myself through more than one story. At the end of the month, I had 31 stories about motherhood of some description that ranged from about 400 words up to 1,000. I called that a success, although they still sit in a document awaiting some serious editing.

Birthday Publishing Deadline

After that was done, I took a good long look at the projects I had and decided that I needed to do something with them. I was twenty-five years old and I really wanted to have SOMETHING published before I got another year older. Grazing through my drafts and ideas, I decided to pick the one that was the absolute closest to being ready to publish, and then just get it out there.

At first, I was thinking my short story collection about a haunted rabbit who actually helps kids (The Rabbit, find it here!) was going to be the winner, so I started getting that edited and beta read. However, I then came across a poetry challenge that encouraged writers to submit a new poem every day for 21 days, then get it published as a chapbook.

Instead of paying the company to put my poetry together and send me a trophy I would either lose or break, I decided to do it all myself. I already had the poetry written, and I felt that it was subjective enough that it probably did not need beta readers before it would be ready. With a cover I made in Canva, I selected the poems that fit together in one theme and threw the whole thing on Amazon for the world to... ignore.

I say that last part in jest, kind of, but I’m also kind of glad that it’s largely ignored by the world. I’m not sure if it’s the imposter syndrome talking or if I’m actually not good at writing poetry, but I’m too afraid to reread the thing at this point. But, it doesn’t matter, because I reached my goal! I published!

(If you really want to see it, you can find it here.)

Finishing the Closest Project

The next closest project was still the short stories that I was, at that point, still calling Dustbunny Ben. With the help of family members and friends, I was able to get it cleaned up quite a bit, especially after all five of the stories got a complete rewrite (eh heh…). I decided that anything I could do on Canva was not going to do it justice, so I paid a cover artist on Fiverr. After some back and forth (and advice from the Indie Cover Project Facebook group) I love the finished product!

I also hired an editor on Fiverr, and she helped a bit, although it was not as thorough as I had hoped. Well, you get what you pay for, and the cost was low. One of my betas who was unavailable until after the hired edit found a few things that the editor had missed. I was incredibly grateful for all of the help I’ve received along the way and was thrilled that I was finally able to… set the KDP draft aside for months while awaiting one final advanced review to put in the description.

Yeah, maybe the procrastinator in me got together with the Imposter Syndrome in me and they had a party where they both just sat and stared at the wall. Well, even though I never got that fifth review, I hit publish in December, just so I would stop feeling guilty about it. Also, I wanted my pen name to be connected more with fiction than nonfiction, which leads me to my next point.

Picture Book Diversions

My goal for the pen name K. R. Norrick had always been fiction, but the genre was a completely different story. I had no idea of a direction. Well, by that I mean I had too many ideas for too many directions. One of those directions took up several weeks (possibly months? I can’t even remember) of the year. That direction was: picture books.

Years ago, I had written a rhyming children’s book and made plans with two of my sisters to have them illustrate it. That’s been slowly in the works since then, and significant progress was made on it in 2022, including me getting the words polished up. That then led me down the rabbit hole of writing and trying to publish other picture books to go along with it.

I wrote a simple rhyming book that was an easy enough concept that I thought I would be able to illustrate it myself using Canva graphics. I watched countless tutorials and read all of the rules about legalities and the like. Then, I spent hours on actually putting together the images, taking them back and forth between Canva and GIMP for editing, and getting them uploaded to KDP.

I ordered ten copies in a late-night manic episode (the same type of episode that also got me to hit publish on each of my books that year, eh heh… Why am I admitting these things?), and when they arrived, I found some mistakes that really could not be overlooked. Oh boy. I set about to fix them immediately, you know, just in case the book blew up overnight and I would get thousands of angry customers.

I took the extra copies to the library to see if they might possibly want to give them away, and they called in the boss to decide. She started reading it, skeptical at first, but then I saw her eyebrows soften on page three. In the end, she said she could really see the potential in it, and that right there was one of the most encouraging experiences I had the whole year! They accepted the copies to give away and gave me one last piece of advice for what I could change in the fixed version.

I have since unpublished that book because I think an actual illustrator could add a much higher quality feel to the book as a whole. Also, I think it’ll be better and less confusing for readers if I publish my picture books under a different version of my name, just to keep some genre consistency. Once I can either afford to pay an illustrator what they’re worth or if I ever get the gumption to do it myself, I’ll revisit that one for sure. (You can still see the book marked unavailable on my Amazon author page.)

Low Content Book Diversions

Another side project that took way too many hours of my time are low-content books. There are tutorials all over the internet for how to make and sell notebooks and puzzle books so that you can earn money without having to write a whole book. While I had tried and given up on that concept a couple of years before, this year I had a different sort of relationship with it.

Instead of trying to make money, I wanted to put together a series of low-content books to buy as gifts for people. I saw a book in the store that was plain and simple, but I thought I could make my own version of the interior and make a variety of pretty covers to go on them. For hours upon hours, I worked on this series, using the same basic interior but changing it up to fit the theme of the individualized covers for my friends.

I had them published for the world because otherwise, I would get a thick band across the middle of them that said, “Not for resale” and that would have defeated the entire purpose of designing pretty covers for that niche. Well, nobody ended up buying them, as expected, since I had not advertised at all, but also I did not end up buying any, because I didn’t finish the entire series for the entire friend group.

They never knew about it, so it was not as if anyone was going to be disappointed about it, but I still felt like a failure for a good while. That being said, after months had passed and I realized that I didn’t have the funds to buy all of those copies anyway, I also realized that they were all published under my fiction author name too. Before the year was out, I unpublished all of those ones too.

Nixie Learn Fiasco

Along with the picture books, I started this whole plan for how I would share free printables for the education of children. They would be helpful for the kids, and I could use them for my own kids as well, and make videos of that to draw viewers to the website where the PDFs would be waiting. It wasn’t the original reason for the free printables, but I also realized that I could share links to my picture books on the same website.

Well, although it was a nice idea, and I did upload nearly 100 free printables to the website, I got burnt out long before any books I wrote would have been finished, unless you count the Canva graphics one, which I try not to. In the end, I had to backburner that idea and leave it as is for people to come across organically, or not at all. Maybe in the future, if I earn enough from writing to fund the illustrations of the books, then I’ll revisit that as well.

I count all of this in my writing post because much of the writing I did for the year was planning and web pages for this project. There are still a couple of Google Docs floating around with all of the printables I still had planned but hadn't made yet. (Here's the website, although my domain is about to expire.)

Fast Drafting and Outlining New Things

All of the practice I got, although admittedly not as much with actual story writing so far that year, had allowed me to learn better how I work as a writer. With that knowledge, I gave myself permission to write really crappy drafts, which also meant that I could get the drafts written faster.

That was all very inspiring, and I made a great many plans for future stories and series that I still haven’t gotten to yet. Are you sensing a pattern? I’m a dreamer, in more ways than one.

Getting the Gig (Ghostwriting)

My plans were not profitable. Like, at all. So, in July, as I passed the dreaded birthday, I decided to go a different direction to earn money. I knew that I would have to work hard and give up rights to my hard work, but the payoff for that was going to be actual money upfront. That tradeoff was worth it to me, so I put myself out there and started applying to work as a ghostwriter.

One of the great parts about starting things and never using them for anything was that I had plenty of samples to use as my portfolio, and I guess they were good enough for a client to reach out to me. If you want to know details about how I actually did all of this (And the hours of research I did on other possible methods for becoming a ghostwriter that I didn’t use) then I’ll link my full post here once it’s finished.

That was another one of the highlights of my writing for the year because I seem to work best with external pressure. It was the first time I had ever actually finished a series, and it helped me practice writing drafts that were at least a little bit cleaner. I made sure that they had editors, so I wasn’t as afraid to just accept the job and get it done, which I’m extremely grateful for.

Winning NaNoWriMo (Sort of)

That ghostwriting series took me from October to the end of December, so when November came around, I naturally decided to use those words to count for NaNoWriMo. Although the job description said two weeks per book, they had to read and approve each book I turned in before they would start the next two-week block, so I had some flexibility on time.

Instead of sitting back and using that wiggle room, I was determined to finish two full novellas (for a total of 50,000 words) for the client within the month of November. That way, I was able to utilize the external pressure to win NaNo for the first time! It may not have been the way I would have liked to win, but it was enough that I felt like I can do this on my own someday. That was all I needed out of the win.

Cowriting

One of the biggest reasons I was able to write as often as I did toward the end of the year was working with other writers. I did all of the writing myself, of course, and due to the nature of the ghostwriting contract, I could not even let them read it. However, just having them there, on video, in what we called writing circles, helped immensely! I also started joining in on live writing sprints by other authors on Youtube.

I was brought into the writing circles by a friend on Facebook, and the other friends I've met as a result have made the whole journey a lot better! We still meet most every week, and I would highly recommend this setup to anyone who works well by having accountability partners.

Lessons Learned/Going Forward

I’m sure there was more that happened, like how I randomly drafted a novella of my own right before getting the ghostwriting contract, but that was in yet another new genre that I won’t use for the next 20 years or so. In any case, what I’ve learned from all of this is that I need to work harder on being more consistent. I need to work harder to be more focused and see my writing goals through.

I’ve learned that when I put in the effort, I can write full drafts and full series. I’ve learned to write with outlines a bit better than I could before, simply because I had to for the client. I also amended the outlines for the client, which meant I was forced to both plan and draft parts of the story in a very short time frame. Pushing myself out of my comfort zone was exhausting, but I learned that it was not impossible.

Now, I know that I’m more capable than I knew before, but part of that is because of how much I’ve improved over the course of the year. Writing is partly about creativity, but it’s also about being willing to put in the work, finding methods that help you to do that, and practicing to improve the craft. I’ve heard these things before, as you may have also, but having it taught to me by experience has been invaluable.

To see how I’m planning to implement these lessons in the year ahead, you can read my goals for 2023 post here. Also, keep up with my quarterly update posts to see how I do (or don’t) put it all into practice. Here goes nothing! Thanks for reading and for all that you do! I hope this inspires you, and have a great 2023!