The Year of Hyperfocus: 2025, A Writing Year in Review

December 31, 2025/0 Comments/in Updates, Write with Jane Austen, Year in Review/by Katherine Cowley

It’s the end of the year, that time when I do writing math!!! And, you know, reflect on what I did as a writer over the course of the year. I may have published a book and guest edited a literary journal, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

This year I spent:

949 hours writing

That’s not bad. Not bad at all. In fact, it’s the second-most hours I have ever put into writing over the course of a year.

Here’s my time spent writing per year (since I started tabulating hours in 2014).

Click here to add your own text

And for those of you who prefer hard numbers over visual approximates:

If you look at the colorful chart above, my hours spent writing per year definitely appears as a wave. And as I skim through my previous Year in Review posts, I can’t help but noting that I have had a lot of writing ups and downs. 2023 was definitely a low point, as was the first half of 2024. In 2017, the image I selected for the year was firefighters putting out a car fire. Contrast that with 2020, when I got a three-book deal, 2021, when my first novel was released, and 2022, when I was one of five nominees for the Mary Higgins Clark Award.

There’s something about being able to look back on over a decade of my career that puts it in perspective. And when I have those days or weeks or months where I wonder why I’m doing this, or if I should keep doing this, I can see the bigger picture.

Lows will be followed by highs.

2023 and 2024 were rather low (that’s an understatement, friends), but they were followed by this year’s high, my new nonfiction book:

This book happened because I had a goal: to release a book about Jane Austen’s writing before Jane Austen’s 250^th birthday. And I made it. But mostly because of the hyperfocus on the project.

Here’s how many hours I spent on writing per month:

Jan. - 77. Feb. 63. Mar. 123. Apr. 72. May. 93. Jun. 59. Jul. 83. Aug. 108. Sept. 79. Oct. 87. Nov. 68. Dec. 29.

And you can see how much of that time was spent on Write with Jane Austen:

A pie chart showing Write with Jane Austen taking up almost the entirety of the chart.

And a bar graph, which in some ways emphasizes it even more:

And yet again, the bar graph shows the same thing.

I spent 70% of my writing time on Write with Jane Austen. I have never, in the 12 years that I’ve been tracking, spent nearly that high a percentage on a single project.

665.83 hours.

Other things I did this year:

“Development.” That’s my catch-all category that includes critiquing writing, writing group, reading books about writing craft, and networking.
I taught writing classes. I taught several Lifelong Learning Classes at Kellogg Community college, and I taught at a writing conference.
Contract work: this year it was doing a touch of work helping my friend Jeanna run a Kickstarter for her book Unsightly
I guest edited a special mystery issue of the literary journal Irreantum. This was both challenging and delightful.

Because I my hyperfocus, I spent only a handful of hours working on short stories, most of which I did not complete. (An hour and a half on a short story is more of a brainstorm than a writing session…). I spent a handful of hours on novels—six, to be precise. In essence, I did no other projects.

But I met my goal.

Write with Jane Austen is my first (and perhaps my only?) nonfiction project, and it was my first project that I launched through Kickstarter, so the process looked rather different than for my Mary Bennet novels.

Here’s an infographic about the writing of Write with Jane Austen, which occurred over the course of six years, from 2020 to 2025:

The Writing Itself: 871 hours. Original Blog Posts: 290 hours. From 2020 to 2025 I wrote 70 (or so) blog posts about what Jane Austen can teach us about writing. Most of these were published between 2020 and 2022. Writing and Revising the Book: 430 hours. I scrapped over 50,000 words, and wrote over 75,000 new words as I created a complete draft of Write with Jane Austen. Then I revised multiple times, and then did copy edits and proofreads. Nonfiction Writing Tasks: 111 hours. There were a number of tasks for this book that were due to it being nonfiction: footnotes, citations, a works cited, checking quote spellings; creating an index and an index locorum; and finding images. Publication Tasks: 337 hours. Formatting: 160 hours. I used InDesign to format the print book, the ebook, and the workbook. This takes a lot of time, especially when your formatting includes dozens of charts, 100 images, subtitles, and footnotes. Publication and Kickstarter Tasks: 177 hours. This umbrella included endless tasks: commission-ing a cover, setting up and running a Kickstarter, uploading books to various platforms, ordering books, signing books, and more.

The 831 hours spent on the writing itself is definitely longer than the time it took to write each individual Mary Bennet novel (The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet took 612.5). But I am immensely pleased with Write with Jane Austen and don’t regret working on it. (Though if I had realized it would take 1168 hours total, I probably would have shied away from the project.)

So that is 2025 in charts galore. I still haven’t fully decided what my 2026 will look like, but I do want to spread myself across more projects rather than focusing on a single one.

***

A few additional notes:

-People always ask, so a few years ago I wrote about how I track my writing time. Read all about it there!

-For those who would like to get their own copy of Write with Jane Austen, on Amazon US, you can get the paperback and hardcover, or the ebook. It’s also available through Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, Kobo, Smashwords, Waterstones (in the UK), various Amazon websites throughout the world, etc. Your indie bookstore or your library should be able to get ahold of a copy if you request it.

Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday and How Austen Wrote Birthday and Holiday Greetings

December 16, 2025/1 Comment/in Jane Austen Writing Lessons, Updates, Write with Jane Austen/by Katherine Cowley

December 16, 2025 is Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, and so to celebrate, here’s a post with:

How Austen wrote birthday and holiday greetings
The letter I wrote to her for her birthday (and the book I wrote for her…probably shouldn’t forget that)

How Jane Austen Wrote Birthday and Holiday Greetings

Jane Austen spent much of her life with her sister and dear friend, Cassandra. However, the times that they were apart are a blessing to us, because from them we have many of Austen’s surviving letters.

In 1799, the day before Cassandra’s birthday, Jane wrote Cassandra a letter which she ended with the following:

I wish you joy of your birthday twenty times over. I shall be able to send this to the post to-day, which exalts me to the utmost pinnacle of human felicity, and makes me bask in the sunshine of prosperity or gives me any other sensation of pleasure in studied language which you may prefer. Do not be angry with me for not filling my sheet, and believe me yours affectionately,
Miss Austen

Not only does Jane wish her sister a twenty-times dose of birthday joy, but she rejoices–nay, feels exalted–because she can send such a letter, and send it immediately.

I don’t think Jane Austen would have liked many of today’s birthday cards, with pre-written sentimental phrases. Even in a letter with birthday greetings, in which there are certain conventions and well-wishes are expected, she must give them in a creative way.

Here, she uses hyperbole, exaggerating her emotions to the extreme. This does not mean she doesn’t feel positively towards her sister–she does feel happy for her sister’s birthday, and wants to express it–but she does so playfully, and probably wants to make her sister laugh. (Jane’s letters, and biographies about her, show that her family loved sharing humor with each other.)

I also like the admission: “or gives me any other sensation of pleasure in studied language which you may prefer.” If Cassandra would not express the joy of sending a birthday letter in the same manner, she is welcome to choose her own studied language. Whatever rhetorical devices or literary flourishes or elegant metaphors–Jane gives them all to Cassandra. I find Jane’s statement reminiscent of Mr. Collins, with the difference being that Austen uses irony and takes delight in recognizing the subtle absurdity of her own statement.

A letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen. This is not any of the letters referenced in this blog post, however, it is a very visually appealing letter, so I have decided to include it. Image via National Library of Australia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And what about holiday greetings? How did Jane write this standard form?

In one letter to Cassandra, she writes:

I am glad you are to have Henry with you again; with him and the boys you cannot but have a cheerful, and at times even a merry, Christmas.

I love the honesty. “At times even…merry.” She doesn’t treat holidays like they need to be perfect.

In another letter written during the holiday season, Austen writes to Cassandra:

I am sorry my mother has been suffering, and am afraid this exquisite weather is too good to agree with her. I enjoy it all over me, from top to toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally; and I cannot but selfishly hope we are to have it last till Christmas,—nice, unwholesome, unseasonable, relaxing, close, muggy weather.

I could write an essay on this paragraph. (Fortunately, I’ve decided to spare you.) But I love the humor, I love how Jane finds joys in unexpected (and sometimes unwanted) occurrences of the season. And I love how she mixes her positive and negative adjectives (nice, unwholesome, unseasonable, relaxing, close, muggy) in a way that both offers insight and provides humor.

But how do we apply this?

I am so glad you asked.

If you want to write like Jane Austen, the next time you send a birthday or holiday greeting, don’t use a pre-written greeting card and definitely don’t use AI (Austen refused to use the average or standard way of saying something, after all). Instead, express your joy and love but be playful or humorous or absurd (or perhaps be all three–playful and humorous and absurd). Make light of adverse circumstances, be realistic, and don’t be afraid to play with expectations.

My Offering For Jane Austen’s Birthday (A Book, and a Birthday Letter!)

Those of you who backed the project on Kickstarter already know this, but I must declare it to the world! I officially met my goal for the year, which was to publish my new book before Jane Austen’s birthday.

A 3D rendering of the book Write with Jane Austen: Masterclasses with the Master Storyteller

Write with Jane Austen: Masterclasses with the Master Storyteller is an in-depth look at all we can learn about writing from Jane Austen’s novels. Jane Austen is a master at all elements of storytelling, and I had years of delight writing about how we can apply her techniques to our writing, no matter what genre we write.

(Did you know that 200 years before Blake Snyder coined the term “save the cat,” Austen was already recommending that writers do just that? Did you know that Austen takes a cinematic approach to describing setting? Did you know that even within a point of view, Austen did not see it as fixed? There’s so much we can learn from writing from Austen.)

Write with Jane Austen is now available in print and ebook through all major retailers, and if you order now, you should be able to get a copy for yourself or a friend before the holidays. On Amazon US, you can get the paperback and hardcover, or the ebook. It’s also available through Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, Kobo, Smashwords, Waterstones (in the UK), various Amazon websites throughout the world, etc. Your indie bookstore or your library should be able to get ahold of a copy if you request it.

I can’t actually send this, but also I wrote a letter to Jane Austen for her birthday, in which I attempt to use some of her epistolary approaches to humor and irony, as well as apologize for my literary transgressions.

Dear Jane,

On this, your 250th birthday, I am not ungrateful to you.

For how could I be ungrateful, when you have ignored birthday conventions and instead of opening your own presents, you have gifted me a present–and a glorious one. Six incredible novels, that have spawned endless adaptations that hopefully you would find delightful and joyous, though it’s possible you would find some of them utterly horrifying. (You should probably catch up on 20th-century zombie stories before you indulge in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you find it horrifying, it is in the horror genre, so it’s an appropriate response.)

Unfortunately, I have contributed to the madness by not only writing three novels about Mary Bennet but also writing a book about your writing. I know that in your time, you had to receive permission from someone in order to dedicate a work to them. While you dedicated your unpublished teenage works to family members in playful ways, you didn’t dedicate any of your published novels, except for Emma, and you probably did that a bit begrudgingly. (I would love to hear the full story someday on the time you were invited to the Prince Regent’s library, and then his librarian semi-forced you to dedicate a book to the prince. We’re pretty sure you wrote a letter about your library trip, and we’re also pretty sure Cassandra destroyed it. What evidence of your true thoughts was she trying to hide?)

Excuse the tangent. I lose focus, in part because I fear your disapproval. The news is this: I wrote a book about you for your birthday, and I dedicated it to you. I asked no permission, but I do ask forgiveness. May there be only rare pages in the book where you say, “That is not what I meant. That is not what I meant at all.”

You may take all the compliments to you in the book. Just know that more compliments are owed than I could manage to express in a few hundred pages.

Best regards, and any happiness that can be had on your 250th birthday.

Yours affectionally,
Katherine Cowley

P.S. Please do not skewer me too harshly in your letters to Cassandra.

I would like to say that writing a book and even a letter is not too shabby of a celebration for my favorite author.

Wishing you all the best, as you celebrate Austen, birthdays, and/or holidays.

Write with Jane Austen: Cover Reveal

February 17, 2025/0 Comments/in Updates, Write with Jane Austen, Writing Lesson/by Katherine Cowley

ETA: May 5th 2025: Write with Jane Austen is now live on Kickstarter!

If you’d like your own copy, you can pre-order the book there.

And now, back to the original post…

Even if you’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours writing a book, the book always feels more real once you have a cover. That’s definitely the case for my upcoming nonfiction work, Write with Jane Austen: Masterclasses with the Master Storyteller.

I’m excited to show the cover for the book, but first, I wanted to tell you a little about the process, behind the scenes.

When my Mary Bennet book covers were being designed, the publisher had me fill out an “Art Fact Sheet” with information about the book. The head designer for the publisher then worked directly with the book’s cover designer. I received cover mockups (drafts, of a sort), and then I gave my feedback to the head designer, who conveyed it to the cover designer.

This time, the process was similar, but different.

Several months ago, I contacted a dream designer and asked if she would be willing to design the cover for my upcoming book.

She said yes.

Then, one of the first things we did was we got on a video call, and we looked at dozens of covers for nonfiction books related to Jane Austen, and nonfiction writing books. The designer asked for my thoughts on which covers I loved and why, and which ones didn’t work for me.

And then, she went to work. She designed three amazing covers, and I got to choose my favorite, which she then refined. And which you now get to see.

The cover reveal for Write with Jane Austen: Masterclasses with the Master Storyteller

Isn’t it gorgeous?

I love the floral wallpaper look, which bridges both Regency and modern styles. I love the font, I love the watercolor paper. I love the colors. Basically, I love everything about the cover, and I hope you like it too.

Here’s a digital rendering of what it will probably look like in 3D, on a physical book:

If you want to make sure to be the first to know when the project goes live, click the “Notify me on launch” button on the Kickstarter page. I really appreciate those who have already done so–publishing a book is always a little (or a lot) scary, and so your support and encouragement means a lot to me.

If you missed the original news about the book and want more details, here’s a blog post I wrote about it.

#69: The Jane Austen Approach to Critiquing Writing

January 27, 2025/0 Comments/in Jane Austen Writing Lessons/by Katherine Cowley

Jane Austen’s Critique Group

I’ve been a member of critique groups for well over a decade, and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be in a critique group with Jane Austen. We know that as a young writer, she frequently shared her drafts with family members and friends, entertaining them with her stories. We know she revised these pieces, and she surely made changes based off of their reactions and their questions.

As a published author, she, in turn, critiqued the writing of others. Her niece, Anna Austen Lefroy, loved to write and asked her aunt for feedback on her works. Between 1814 and 1816, Jane wrote a series of letters to Anna, giving entertaining, helpful, and at times difficult critiques.

One thing that stands out to me is that Jane Austen uses many of the same critiquing methods that I learned in graduate school, when I was studying best practices for teaching writing.

The Sandwich Critique Method: Good-Bad-Good

In Austen’s letters, she never just tells Anna what isn’t working: she also gives positive feedback.

In an undated letter, likely from the spring or early summer of 1814, Jane wrote to her niece:

MY DEAR ANNA,

I am very much obliged to you for sending your MS [manuscript]. It has entertained me extremely; all of us indeed. I read it aloud to your Grandmama and Aunt Cass., and we were all very much pleased. The spirit does not droop at all. Sir Thos., Lady Helen and St. Julian are very well done, and Cecilia continues to be interesting in spite of her being so amiable. It was very fit you should advance her age. I like the beginning of Devereux Forester very much, a great deal better than if he had been very good or very bad. A few verbal corrections are all that I felt tempted to make; the principal of them is a speech of St. Julian to Lady Helen, which you see I have presumed to alter. As Lady H. is Cecilia’s superior, it would not be correct to talk of her being introduced. It is Cecilia who must be introduced. And I do not like a lover speaking in the 3rd person; it is too much like the formal part of Lord Orville, and I think it not natural. If you think differently, however, you need not mind me. I am impatient for more, and only wait for a safe conveyance to return this book.

Yours affectionately, J. A.

This letter uses the classic sandwich technique for critiquing: start with the positive, then detail what could be improved, and then end with more positive. In other words, wrap what might be difficult to hear in between things that are working and positive encouragement.

A classic delicious sandwich that metaphorically represents critiquing writing

Thus, Jane begins with “It has entertained me extremely” and ends with “I am impatient for more.”

At other times, Austen weaves the positive and the negative together. In a letter written on September 28^th, 1814, Jane analyzes Anna’s characters, dissecting which ones are working and which ones need work:

We like the first chapter extremely, with only a little doubt whether Lady Helena is not almost too foolish. The matrimonial dialogue is very good certainly. I like Susan as well as ever, and begin now not to care at all about Cecilia; she may stay at Easton Court as long as she likes. Henry Mellish will be, I am afraid, too much in the common novel style,—a handsome, amiable, unexceptionable young man (such as do not much abound in real life), desperately in love and all in vain. But I have no business to judge him so early. Jane Egerton is a very natural, comprehensible girl, and the whole of her acquaintance with Susan and Susan’s letter to Cecilia are very pleasing and quite in character. But Miss Egerton does not entirely satisfy us. She is too formal and solemn, we think, in her advice to her brother not to fall in love; and it is hardly like a sensible woman,—it is putting it into his head. We should like a few hints from her better.

Jane paints a clear picture of strengths and weaknesses: some of the characters are “pleasing,” they feel natural and likeable, while other characters are cliché (“too much in the common novel style”) or “too formal and solemn.”

Writing exists with an audience in mind, and as a critiquer, you step in for the audience, sharing your reactions to the story, as well as your assumptions on how larger audiences will react. Thus, it’s useful for Jane to share both what is working and what is not working. Clearly we need to know what’s not working—it’s difficult to take a story from our heads and hearts and place it on a page, to convey that which want to convey. An audience reaction can let us know what needs to be improved. But we also need to know what is good about our writing—we need affirmation. In part, this is for self-esteem purposes, but more importantly we need to know what’s working well so we keep it in the story. Also, when we know that a technique is working well, we can emulate it in the rest of the story.

A modern scholar, William Hart-Davidson, recommends using a describe-evaluate-suggest model when giving a critique, and we see Austen using this very approach. She describes what she sees in a character, evaluates what she sees according to the goals of the story, and then, if needed, gives suggestions for improvement.

Thus, she describes the character of Henry Mellish as “a handsome, amiable, unexceptionable young man” and then evaluates the character according to her metric, feeling like a real person—she writes that he is a type that does “not much abound in real life.” The suggestion is implied—Anna should make him less “in the common novel style” and pull back on some of his characteristics.

Respecting the Storyteller

One of the other things I notice as I read Jane’s letters is the respect that she shows to Anna as a storyteller. Jane does not assume that she, the person giving feedback, knows better than the writer.

Thus, in the undated letter she writes:

I do not like a lover speaking in the 3rd person; it is too much like the formal part of Lord Orville, and I think it not natural. If you think differently, however, you need not mind me.

In a different letter, at the end of a rather critical paragraph, Austen writes:

Excuse the liberty I take in these suggestions.

Personally, if I were to receive a critique from Jane Austen, I’d probably apply every piece of feedback without question. But when Austen gives specific feedback, she is careful to frame it as a suggestion. Yes, she is a published author and her niece is not, but she knows that ultimately it’s Anna’s story. Anna can choose to apply the feedback if she wishes, but Jane does not want her to feel obligated to do so.

This is a healthy attitude to take when giving a critique: the goal is to help the writer revise and tell their own story in their own way, to the best of their abilities. It’s not to dominate or dictate, or to encourage that story that you would personally tell.

I’ve given a lot of feedback to authors, and I’m definitely gotten better at it over the years. I look back on a few early critiques I gave and cringe. I’ve also received a lot of invaluable feedback. I don’t use every suggestion, but I appreciate all those who have helped me improve my writing. I imagine that Jane Austen was also grateful for the support and feedback she received on her works.

In the next few weeks, I’ll share additional posts on what we can learn from Jane Austen about revision, including being aware of your audience as you revise. Meanwhile, I’m revising my upcoming Write with Jane Austen book, which will be launching in a few months on Kickstarter.

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Archive for year: 2025