2008 writing roundup

I know it’s several days past when everyone else was doing this, but I was away from home and my net access was flaky, which made it difficult to check one or two things. Anyway, here is a look at what I did with writing and reading in 2008.

Wrote: very little as far as fiction goes. Around 23 kwords on the third of the set of three novelettes that I intended to use as a sequel to Lord and Master (of which 2 and 3 actually ended up in the published book, and 1 went on my website). 7 kwords on the L&M short story written specifically for my website. 6 kwords on the third L&M book.

And then there was the sudden outbreak of fanfic after five years of feeling no urge to fanfic at all. Only one complete story, and that a very short one, but there are notes for several more. Apparently Torchwood reaches the parts other fandoms cannot.

So only 40 kwords, even counting scraps and notes. That’s the least I’ve written for years. Looking for a day job, and then getting one and having to learn it, basically killed my writing in 2008. It wasn’t the loss of writing time, but the loss of mental energy. I could have found time to write 300 words of fiction a day. I just couldn’t find the 300 words.

One book published in 2008, being the aforementioned Lord and Master sequel. I also put two shorts in the series up on my website.

And four books went out of print. The Syndicate series first went on sale through Loose Id in 2004, and was withdrawn from sale in June 2008. The three main books were part of Loose Id’s initial lineup, having been contracted a couple of months before the LI site formally opened in July 2008. So yes, Loose Id were selling m/m romance novels right from the start, back when most romance publishers wouldn’t touch them. The first two books had been published before, at an erotica micropress, but that was an erotica publisher rather than a romance publisher. Four years in print was a decent enough run, especially as part of the series had been previously published anyway, so they’re now on my website as a giveaway rather than looking for another publisher.

I did write a few essay type blog posts, notably My Book was a number 1 Bestseller on Amazon! (and why it doesn’t mean anything), Conversation with the genre — plagiarism, allusion, and intertextuality, Welcome to the Panopticon, little author, No, actually, it’s because I prefer cock, Writing: Culture Clash, and Pushing envelopes.

I’ve been reasonably consistent about keeping a log of the books I’ve read this year, although I’ve only written reviews for a minority of them. It looks as if I read around 22-25 books last year, depending on what you count. This is really not good, because a writer needs to read, but my reading did pick up towards the end of the year. And the reason why is that I finally got the hang of ebooks. Yes, yes, I’m published in ebooks, but I always found reading them to be a lot harder than reading treeware. And then predatrix asked if I was interested in buying her Cybook, and trying it out for a week led me to the discovery that I can read it on the bus without feeling sick, unlike treeware. Sitting on a bus for an hour a day, with an ebook device that *doesn’t* give me a headache to use, boosted my reading rate rather noticeably.

Here’s hoping that 2009 will see an improvement on the word count for both writing and reading.