This week at 1pm in the Makerspace at the Tyler Public Library I will be speaking at the Open Door Writing Group on Planning Your Writing Life, including tips and tricks to help you live your best, most creative, productive writing life.
Tag: Writing Check Up
I’ve been very bad about tallying up all of last year’s writing, but I think I’m finally done with it.
- In 2025, I wrote 104,303 words. Of those words,
- 5559 were for this blog (29 short posts),
- 3,660 were in 2 essays
- 26,396 were for my journal,
- 43,436 were for handouts, scripts, and slides for lessons (15 lessons),
- 15,692 were on various social media accounts,
- 12,094 were poetry (68 poems – a lifetime record),
- and 7,566 were in short stories (36 pieces of flash fiction).
- If you tally all those numbers up, I wrote 150 discrete items, not counting social media posts and journal entries because those don’t really get published. (So 150 items in 215 days, which means about 1 item every 1 and a quarter days)
- There were only 120 days that I didn’t write anything, mostly due to illness, travel, or moving my kids from house to house. So I wrote on 2/3rds of the days of the year, which basically comes down to working on writing 5 days a week and leaving myself weekends for living, if I were the kind of person that followed a schedule like that. I mean, I try, but there were loads of weeks where I missed several weekdays and wrote straight through the weekends.
- I only submitted about 5 items all year because it was just sooooo much chaos. I had 2 acceptances and the last 3 items are still well within their response timezones (there’s a better word for this, but the phone in the next room keeps ringing and ringing and I cannot think of it). The two acceptances will be published in early to mid 2026.
- I had 15 speaking engagements last year. The vast majority did not pay, but were for a group that both feeds my soul and lets me practice my topics with them. Two were for free for the library (who I love and who graciously supports two of my writing groups), but I got several paid teaching side gigs out of them, so that about broke even in terms of payment, really.
- As for reading, I finished 65 books and read parts of another 13, mostly for research, but also a couple of things I’ve had to mark DNF because I didn’t like their take on the topic or the writing style or something.
That’s it! One more year as a writer in the books. 🙂
It’s the first Monday of the first full week of 2024 and my official start to the new year. I always like to start off a new year looking back at the last year and seeing what I accomplished and try to plan for what I think I can do better in the upcoming year.
2023 in Review:
- Overall, I wrote 160,202 words
- January – 14,454
- February – 33,559
- March – 27,344
- April – 6,387
- May – 29,548
- June – 8,742
- July – 25,341
- August – 1,671
- September – 1,571
- October – 5,100
- November – 5,119
- December – 1,456
- 3,105 written for this blog
- 40, 036 for Caro’s Quest
- 13,676 in my journals
- 45,436 for the Hannah Project, which makes my heart sad
- 3,024 in poetry
- 7, 723 in little flash fiction bits during writing groups
- 1,495 in short stories outside of other writing groups
- 2,250 for a non-fiction essay which was accepted for publication in an anthology about chronic illness
- 15,838 in my social media accounts
- 24,083 in lessons and worksheets and speeches for various writing groups
- And 4,022 at the end of the year on the Lake House Mystery
- (Most of this did not include background writing for various novels in progress – just writing that ended up in the draft)
So, I did pretty well for the first half of the year…and then health woes (both mental and physical) slowed me down considerably. So for next year, I will work on powering through the pain and not letting myself get distracted by non-writing side projects as much as I did this year.
I spoke today at the Tyler Public Library’s Writing Club Facebook Group on “How to Do a Writing Check-Up.” I spoke about what to include in the check-up and how to use the results to make goals and improve yourself and your writing business. I included some exercises geared towards that and then also some regular writing exercises, just for fun. It went really well! If you are a member of the group, you can see the replay of the live video here: {link}
Lisa Holcomb 