Halftime! So How is My Writing Year Going?

On January 1st of this year I published this post with my writing resolutions for 2014. Today is June 30, the halfway point in the year, so it’s a good time to assess how well I’m doing following through on my resolutions.

Where I’ve Failed

In the January 1 post I listed several projects I aimed to pursue. My Number 1 goal was to create more content. The first item on the list was a trio of comic mysteries based upon characters in my novel, High Concepts. I spent a lot of time working on these stories in the first and second quarters of the year, completing drafts of the first two and parts of two different approaches to the third story. In the end, and for more than one reason, I just wasn’t happy with how things were going and ultimately decided not to go forward with them. Such dead-ends are natural enough, I suppose, but I can’t help feeling frustrated with all the (apparently) wasted time and effort. Sometimes I think I depend too much on feeling in assessing whether a story is working or not. Yet at the same time, I felt there was something forced in my approach to these stories. Maybe in time I will return to them but I have no plans to do so at present.

In other project abandonment news, I also decided to abandon a prequel to my Kingdom of Patria children’s series which I spent a good deal of effort on in 2013. It was a good decision in the end, but again, I’m frustrated by the time and energy lost.

I further dabbled in writing a one-act play for audio but did not commit to it decisively enough.

Generally, I change my mind overmuch about what projects I will pursue. On my January 1 list, for example, was a novel for adults. I flirted with a beginning of such a project but without real commitment. I can see in my datebook for May 23 a fresh list of new projects, a list I had abandoned almost as soon as I had written it down.

So clearly one of my biggest failures is being all over the place in terms of the project(s) I’m absolutely committed to.

In the second quarter of 2014 I also was not as consistent as I would like to have been in writing every day. I need to recommit to that goal today. This postfrom The Daily Beast, “How I Wrote 400K Words in A Year,” as well as this post on my New Year’s Writing Regimen, serve as a good, swift kick in the pants.

Where I’ve Succeeded

a. Works Published

On April 23 I published a play, The Actor. Writing drama was one of chief goals for 2014.

On June 16 I published a post-apocalyptic short story with a comic-romantic twist, “The Bureau of Myths.”

b. Developing My Digital Platform at danielmcinerny.com

On May 12 I committed to blogging at danielmcinerny.com every day. While I haven’t posted absolutely every day since then, I have posted much more regularly and I’m glad to report that the number of page views on the site has doubled from May to June. My email subscriber list has also been increasing more regularly in the last several weeks. The list receives an email newsletter from me once per month. (If you’d like to join the list, just go to the email signup form on the homepage of danielmcinerny.com.) In January I thought I would also develop a podcast but that idea is on hold for the present.

c. Developing My Platform as a Public Speaker

On May 17 I spoke at the IHM Maryland Homeschooling and Parent Conference in Mt. Airy, Maryland: “Children’s Literature, Catholicism, and the Golden World.”

On June 20 I spoke at the IHM National Homeschooling and Parent Conference in Fredericksburg, Virginia: a revised version of the Maryland talk. At both conferences Trojan Tub Entertainment maintained a booth in the vendors’ area. I sold a good number of books at the Fredericksburg conference, especially, which has helped make June 2014 my biggest sales month ever across all my titles.

In 2014 I’ve also appeared on Sheila Liaugminas’s radio program, “A Closer Look,” twice (the first having to do with The Actor and the second having to do with children’s literature and my Kingdom of Patria series), and on my friend Karen Hornsby’s radio program, “Wake Up! Lousiana” twice.

I have one speaking engagement scheduled for October at Villanova University. In the fall I plan on pursuing many more readings at schools and public libraries.

Where I’ve Changed My Mind

In January this site was still called The Comic Muse, but it wasn’t long before I decided that my own name was a better title for my platform and so I changed the name and asked my illustrator, Ted Schluenderfritz, to revise the banner on the site accordingly.

Also, in January I was looking to make what is now danielmcinerny.com the hub of an online community of Catholic writers. Though I am happy to identify myself as a Catholic author and am delighted by the presence of Catholic writers who have joined my subscriber list, I changed my mind about how I want to profile my platform. Now I’m interested in taking an approach to writing that is certainly inspired by the Catholic tradition but which is not exclusively focused on explicitly Catholic things. This is itself a Catholic position. For given a Catholic understanding of the goodness of the natural order, it makes perfect sense that a concern with the natural principles of storytelling will reflect what is ultimately a Catholic understanding of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes blog about Catholic things or that my writing doesn’t reflect my beliefs. It’s simply that I want to find as much common ground with non-Catholic writers and even non-religious writers as I can.

Tomorrow I’ll let you know how I plan to proceed in the second half of 2014.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear how your own writing year is going. What are your successes and failures? How have you changed course? What have you learned?