{"id":2638,"date":"2017-12-17T20:56:23","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T02:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seth-swanson.com\/2017-wrap-up\/"},"modified":"2017-12-17T20:56:23","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T02:56:23","slug":"2017-wrap-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/2017\/12\/17\/2017-wrap-up\/","title":{"rendered":"2017 wrap-up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s difficult to sum up a span of time like a year in a few short (long in my case) paragraphs, but the last couple years have kinda shared a theme. There were highs, and there were lows. When you&#8217;re attempting to be creative, the shit that&#8217;s going on in the world can really have an impact over what you get done.<\/p>\n<p>And 2017 was a number year for shit going wrong in the world. <!--more--><\/p>\n<h2>What happened in 2017?<\/h2>\n<p>But, I&#8217;m not here for postmortem on the year as a whole. I think we all know what happened, and we can remember it later. Here&#8217;s how I did on writing this year.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/img_0689.jpg\" class=\"wp-image-2637 size-full\" height=\"800\" width=\"1200\" srcset=\"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/img_0689.jpg 1200w, http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/img_0689-300x200.jpg 300w, http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/img_0689-1024x683.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/img_0689-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>As you can see, the first part of the year was utter crap for writing. Jan-May were pretty much nothing months, with the sole victory of rediscovering one of my previous years&#8217; NaNoWriMo novels, the now named Blood Log.<\/p>\n<p>Still, instead of focusing on failures, I&#8217;m going to focus on the fact that I took what I&#8217;d done on Blood Log and ran with it. I&#8217;ve now got a finished first draft, and notes to start in on the second draft.<\/p>\n<p>NaNoWriMo 2018 was something of a wash. I didn&#8217;t finish the full 50k, but I did at least get a start on the second Blood Log novel, which I&#8217;m still having fun with. At this point, I&#8217;m not sure how far I&#8217;ll take Blood Log, but it will be my first published novel. I won&#8217;t start shopping it around to agents until I&#8217;ve finished a third draft, and I don&#8217;t expect many to bite at it since the Urban Fantasy market is falling at the moment. Still, who knows? Maybe I&#8217;ll get lucky. Assuming though that traditional publishing fails me, I&#8217;m going to be paying for editing and a book cover and maybe it&#8217;ll be for sale on Amazon sometime in 2019? By then, I should have the second book finished, and in the editing process. We&#8217;ll see how it goes.<\/p>\n<p>Where does that leave Impervious? I don&#8217;t really know. I certainly haven&#8217;t given up on it. I think I could bring that one to market, but I still think it was the wrong project to focus on given my level of experience. Once I&#8217;ve got a few books done and out the door, I&#8217;ll dust Impervious off, dust off the sequel and finish them both out. I&#8217;m not averse to self-publishing those&#8230;but they&#8217;re huge, and will cost some serious money to get edited myself. Maybe a few other books earning money on Amazon would fund its editing?<\/p>\n<h2>What&#8217;s happening in 2018?<\/h2>\n<p>So, I had a bad writing year. It happened. I&#8217;ve had those before and I&#8217;ll have them again. My main goal is to power through a second draft to Blood Log and get it out to some beta readers with enough time left to also push out a third draft. I also want to at least get a good start on the first draft of the second Blood Log novel, if not finish it. However, I&#8217;ll be starting the year off by writing the first &#8220;light novel&#8221; for Edge of December. It doesn&#8217;t have a name yet. It barely has an outline in my brain. I&#8217;m not even sure exactly how its going to work, but expect that one to move faster, as Glenn is eager to continue the EoD story and so am I. It&#8217;s been too long without the ridiculous disasters that Kieron, Trife, and the gang got themselves into.<\/p>\n<h2>What about WordKeeperAlpha?<\/h2>\n<p>Yeah, I haven&#8217;t been communicating very well on WKA, and I haven&#8217;t been too good about developing new features either. I&#8217;ll be honest. My eyes, they are a wandering. Not so much <em>away <\/em>from WordKeeperAlpha, and more towards WKA 3.0. A lot has happened in the world of web dev since I came out with WKA 2.0 and I&#8217;ve tried to roll with the times as I continued development, which has lead to WKA&#8217;s code base to become fragments and a bit of a mess. I&#8217;ve been itching to start in on 3.0 with my collection of new toys and ideas that I&#8217;ve come up with.<\/p>\n<p>Hence, after my next major update, and along with a few &#8220;quality of life&#8221; improvements, I think that I&#8217;m going to start in on 3.0 sometime next year. I&#8217;m not going to be building things out from the ground up, entirely, but I will be re-architecting things, using a LOT more JavaScript, and finally get around to implementing that full-blown API I&#8217;ve been talking about for a while. It&#8217;s gonna be a <em>metric ton<\/em> of work, so don&#8217;t expect a lot of news on this front. I&#8217;ll still be around though, doing bug fixes on 2.0 and generally making sure the lights stay on.<\/p>\n<p>WKA was always supposed to do a lot more than what it does right now. The system that I&#8217;ll be building should be able to accommodate a lot more and be a little more flexible than the first one I created. Look forward to it sometime in the distant future!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s difficult to sum up a span of time like a year in a few short (long in my case) paragraphs, but the last couple years have kinda shared a theme. There were highs, and there were lows. When you&#8217;re attempting to be creative, the shit that&#8217;s going on in the world can really have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}