I have been asked to speak at the February meeting of the East Texas Writer’s Guild on February 10, 2025. They meet from 6:30pm-8:00pm in the Genecov Room of the Tyler Area Chamber of Commerce Building (aka The Blackstone Building) in downtown Tyler. Hope to see some of you there!
Category: My Own Personal Weirdness
Today I’m giving a lesson on Sounds in Poetry over at the Tyler Public Library at 1pm in the Makerspace (behind the computer lab on the third floor). But don’t let that scare you away if you’re not a poet. I’m covering poetry, a little bit about songwriting, and how to use lyricism in your prose as well.
Hope to see you there!
If you know me in real life, you know I love analyzing things. One of my favoritest things to look at is my writing data. I love seeing which months I had the most success in and in which category and then what that looks like over time. So here’s what 2024 looked like.
All Writing Combined:
140,352
Number of Words By Month:
January: 9,017
February: 19,253
March: 9,440
April: 6,562
May: 6,166
June: 9,417
July: 13,961
August: 23,215
September: 5,966
October: 13,824
November: 22,477
December: 1,054
Number of Words By Category:
Blog: 2527
Essays: 1,063
Lessons: 43,549
Lake House Mystery: 36,258
Journal: 21,503
Miscellaneous: 16,939
Short Fiction: 13,664
Poetry: 4,434
Best Month for Each Category:
Blog: January at 546
Essays: June at 487
Lessons: February at 12,031 (that surprised me – I really thought it’d be October)
Lake House Mystery: November at 18,468 (that did not surprise me)
Journal: April at 3,811
Miscellaneous: October at 2,890
Short Fiction: June at 2,494
Poetry: February at 2,157 (that poem about teeth was LONG, y’all!)
I know, I know…you almost forgot I worked here. I have the usual excuses, all tied up with string, sitting under a cat somewhere. Last year was a doozy of a year, filled with all manner of distractions, procrastinations, and other sundry explosions of my life.
I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about what my writing goals are for this year. One is to make my usual chart of what all I wrote last year, but that isn’t done yet because the transcribing isn’t done. So no numbers today. Maybe tomorrow. After I’ve written, of course.
I’m on the schedule with an editor for September, so my big goal is to finish the latest draft of my big epic fantasy novel and polish it up. This is the novel y’all have heard me refer to as Caro’s Quest in the past. I still need a better name for it, but that will come. 🙂
Smaller goals include finding homes for my poetry and short stories, finishing putting together my first poetry anthology, finishing my research on the best time to release it, and then publishing that anthology. I’m aiming for sending off at least one poem and one short story a week. We’ll see if that’s a manageable goal as time goes on and reassess after the first quarter is over.
I’m no longer on the board for the East Texas Writing Guild, nor my UU church board. Those were positive decisions for me, based on me needing more time to write. I’m continuing on as a moderator for the Open Door Writing Group at the Tyler Public Library for the foreseeable future, which means writing and giving a presentation for a monthly lesson about writing.
That’s about it, y’all. It’s my first day back at the writing desk. I’m planning on starting off all my weekdays from here on out at my writing desk, working on stories or poetry for the first half of every day before moving on to social media, lesson writing, and marketing in the afternoons.
Yay 2025! I hope this year will be so much better than the last. 🙂
How is it already September? The summer went by so quickly and I’ve spent so much of it rushed off my feet with all the background, real-life stuff that is hard to cover in a blog post.
Here’s an update on my word counts from the last few months:
June: 8,880
July: 12,807
August: 22,434
Look at how I’ve improved! I’ve triple-checked that last one, but it is correct.
June’s improvement mainly came from writing more short stories. I stayed pretty busy with all the behind the scenes stuff from the other house, getting my eldest ready to go spend a month in China, teaching at both the ODWG writing groups, etc.
July’s word count bump came from not only more writing days in front of the computer on short story work, but also in the category I call “Lessons”, which I write for my local area writing groups. I was trying to get ahead for the busier times of the year when I’d have less time to prepare a lesson. It’s wild to me that I had any kind of improvement at all, really, because my spouse and I spent two weeks flat out with Covid.
August’s giant improvement came in the form of a road trip with my husband. For our anniversary last month, he surprised me with a trip to a little town in the middle of nowhere, which had a fantastic vibe, lots of fun things to tour, and quirky town oddities. Well, that tied in to the long-neglected Lake House Mystery in my brain. So I pulled out that old manuscript, updated a few bits here and there, and then started adding some fun stuff that popped into my head during the trip. After six days of adding little bits here, there, and everywhere, I had an extra 16,000-ish words added, all easy-peasy, which was amazing because that literally doubled the size of this manuscript.
I’m not done there, though. This mystery needs about 30,000 more words before it’ll be done. I’m wanting to finish that this month, while the mood is still is the air, so to speak. Crossing my fingers and hoping real hard.
-L
I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group – Night Group at the UU Fellowship of Tyler next Thursday, July 25, 2024 on the topic of “Story Beats and Echoes”. This is an updated version of what I taught at the day group, so come on over and join us!
This month’s word count was even worse – only 5,562 words overall, nearly all of it journaling projects I was working on as homework from therapy. My Wednesday writing group started an offshoot nighttime group this month and I’m one half of the team leading it. So far we haven’t had quite the turnout we hoped for. So many people said they needed an evening group, but far fewer are showing up. ODWG also started work on an idea for an anthology, which should be fun. I prepared and taught one lesson on “How to Write For an Anthology” and one on “Character Reactions” for both the day and the night group. I wrote a few things about frogs for the anthology.
In real life, I got strep throat on top of all my other illnesses. My city was in the path of totality for the solar eclipse, so I got to enjoy that from my front yard. I lost electricity due to another storm for a couple of days. A tree fell in my kids’ yard, taking out nearly all of the patio furniture. My kids beloved band director unexpectedly resigned midyear and we have no idea what’s going on with that. My youngest kid bought another car, this time from his brother’s ex-girfriend, and sold us his old one. It was also my birthday month, so I went out with the kids on my birthday, took my husband to the airport for a work trip, then had lunch and a fun afternoon with my BFF in DFW that day, then had a dinner with other friends later in the week.
This month, word count was down again, at 8,833 words, nearly all lessons for ODWG again. Spring Break always throws things off, especially when friends and family have the other week off for their spring break.
I also tried to design a new closet for my writing/craft studio, which would have gone better if my closet had enough studs in the wall. But mostly I started the month sick, did a bunch of stuff with other people, then ended the month sicker than I started (flu, bronchitis, sinus infection, walking pneumonia). We decided not to do Easter with family because I was just so sick.
All I managed to do really was work on a crocheted blanket for a friend’s kid/kid’s friend that is very special to our family and is very sick herself right now.
This month, I managed 17,967, but 2/3 of it was lessons for the ODWG. I also tried to train a new membership chair for one of my local writing groups.
I wrote one really long poem about teeth. No, really. It started off about teeth and then it got weird. I also wrote a poem about grief that involved Pokemon. You know you want to read that one. (There were several other poems this month as well, but those were my favorites).
I also was the featured speaker of the month for my local writers guild. I spoke on “How to Get Back on Track After Life’s Disasters.”
In real life, I had to figure out how to do my local church’s annual certification because our board president’s life exploded that week. I attended the first of hopefully many delightful meetings of a local yarn group. I loom-knitted one sock and then tried to figure out how to regular knit it’s partner after my sock loom broke. I started a crocheted snowflake blanket.
I also spoke at two other groups, using the “How to Get Back on Track…” lesson as a starting point. Which was only funny because disasters kept making it so I almost didn’t get to speak at either group (first an epic hail storm and then a mass internet outage).
I also read The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammet.
I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group at the Tyler Public Library at 1pm on February 28, 2024 on the topic of “How to Get Back on Track after Life’s Little Disasters”. Come on over and join us! (I will try to promise a hail-free experience, unlike what happened last time I gave this lesson – hahaha)
Lisa Holcomb 