I don’t know about you, but its been a pretty good year in House Swanson. We went to Phoenix Comic-con and had a blast with the Edge of December crew, despite the state being filled to the brim with creatures whose only purpose is to kill. I’m not even talking about the con attendees. I can not fathom how people have cities in a place where you might have a scorpion in your shoes in the morning. It might be there, or not. A venomous surprise first thing. Schroedinger’s scorpion. I remember we went out to swim in the pool one night, and Glenn was looking around for something near the pool, and he said, “Be careful, there’s some black widows over here,” like I might say, “Hey, there’s some ice on that stair.” *shiver* The two are NOT EQUIVALENT!
Katie and I moved into a nice new house. Its been a great little house so far, and we’re looking forward to staying there for a few more years before we’re ready to actually buy a house and settle down somewhere.
I completely recoded and revamped WordKeeperAlpha and launched it in … August, I think. Since then I’ve gone from about 5 users on the old system to over 250 at last count. Prior to the new version being launched I got maybe 5 hits a day, most of those from some dumb web crawler out of the Netherlands…which I’m still trying to figure out how to ban from my sites completely. Jerks. I digress… Now I’m clocking in at nearly 40 hits per day, and as many as 80! Its really kind of awesome that people are actually using this thing that I made. I know that I’ve said that before, but I really thought that I’d be fortunate if 100 people ever found it, let alone used it on a regular basis.
I got started with a new writing group, well, just one patient person who’s helping me with Impervious, as I’m helping them with their project… at least, I hope I am. Still, its good to be in a writing group again.
Impervious is coming right along, even if the second draft isn’t done yet. I’d hoped to have that done by the end of the year, but I’m at least still making progress. I’ve got a nice week and a half before I have to go back to work, and I’m going to be using that time to punch in a few more words before the years over and to get a nice head start on 2015. I’ve got some grander goals for 2015: getting my second draft finished, the third draft started and finished, starting the second draft of the second book, and using NaNoWriMo to get a jump start on the third book in the trilogy … if its a trilogy, I’m not sure yet.
I didn’t finish NaNoWriMo this year, only clocking in at 25,000 words. Am I disappointed? A little. But, it seems like NaNo is going to be more for punching out most of a first draft than working on second drafts. I’ve been much more picky working on the second draft of Impervious, which is why it hasn’t been coming along quite as fast as the first draft did.
I was hoping that I’d be able to write at least 180,000 words in 2014, but I ended up getting about 120,000 done. I still feel pretty good about that, mostly because of everything I was able to get done with WordKeeperAlpha. I’m not really going to be talking about my goals for 2015 right now, I’ll get into that in a different post at the start of 2015, but I am going to be putting more focus on both reading more books and writing.
So. 2014. I didn’t get in shape. I didn’t finish the second draft of Impervious. I did kick ass at making WordKeeperAlpha. I’m happy, healthy (relatively speaking) and not wanting for anything other than more hours in the day to do more stuff. I think I’m going to call 2014 a success, and work on making 2015 an even better year. Here’s to all of you lovely people, hoping you had a great year, and the coming one will treat you better still. Happy New Years, folks!