2019 in Review: Writing, Writing, and More Writing

I would be remiss if I did not write my annual post about writing in the past year.

In 2019, I wrote more than I have in any previous year, coming in at 734.45 hours. That averages out to about two hours a day, every single day. (In comparison, last year I wrote 675 hours, which was a personal best; in 2017 I only wrote 400.)

Of course, I didn’t spend two hours writing every single day–there were weeks where I did much more, and weeks where I did much less:

And what did I do with those hours?

First and foremost, I spent 381 hours on my Regency Mystery Novel

• Draft 2: 58 hours (I had started Draft 2 in 2018)
• Draft 3: 108 hours
• Newspaper Research: 18 hours
• Draft 4: 6 hours
• Draft 5: 15 hours
• Draft 6: 77 hours
• Draft 7: 16 hours
• Submitting to Literary Agents: 47.5 hours
• Working on Book 2: 34 hours
• And other minor tasks

The big news of the year was getting a literary agent, something I wrote extensively about in another blog post.

And then the rest of the writing time was a mix of writing/revising short stories, critiquing, conferences, writing groups, running an international writing contest for a literary nonprofit, journal writing, etc. I had one short story published during the year, Paradisiacal Glory

During the year, I wrote a solid 55,000 words, and perhaps a significant amount more (during the revision process I rewrite a lot of entire sentences, paragraphs, and scenes, which sometimes doesn’t end up in my word count log).

Not included in my writing chart, but also writing-related: In August 2019, I started a part time job, working as an adjunct faculty member at Western Michigan University, where I now teach first-year writing.

And that’s my year! For the next year, I plan to finish book 2 in my Regency mystery series, and perhaps start researching a new series.