Thursday 1 January 2015

2014 in a nutshell

Happy New Year everyone!
Sometimes I lose track of stuff; quite a lot, actually… I am a tad scatterbrained. So now is a good time to look back and reflect on the past year.
Fanfiction.
I posted four stories; three were one shots. Offerings, Kiss me out of Desire, Almost done running and ‘Til your singing eyes.
I averaged 3-4k hits a day total on fanfiction.net alone. My total hits are up to 7,451,326. I won 8 awards.
I did get many, many lovely reviews from readers. Quite a few who said something like it was their favourite story ever on fanfic (for five different stories). It is such a truism that you cannot pick what people will or will not like.
FictionPad and Ao3 were very quiet for me. Wattpad was intriguing and has some new stats I want to keep an eye on. 20% of my readers are Thai? Really?
Original work
I did manage to find and install a script for Google Drive to do a word count. Now, I just need to remember to write in the ‘sandbox’ folder if I want it to be counted. It has worked beautifully all year, except for two occasions when there was an issue that turned out to be verbosity. Yes, too many words in the documents to be able to send a backup email to my Evernote account of the words I wrote that day. Easy fixed by copying and pasting elsewhere, or moving stories that had been posted out of the sandbox folder. (http://www.jamierubin.net/2013/07/11/my-google-writing-tracker-scripts-now-available-on-github/)
My Excel spreadsheet says I wrote 265,000 words in 2014. I am sure that total is not accurate because I keep forgetting to enter some stuff.
My blog has over 48,000 hits. I posted 127 blog posts; 69 of which were short stories. I think 23 of them have possibilities for extension … sigh. (My curse to extend one shots continues.) The Airship Mechanic was my most popular post for 2014.
My ‘how to edit fanfic’ posts from 2013 still take the lead. Clearly a need for that and I was glad to help out.
I won national novel writing month (nanowrimo) - that novel is up to 80k words and still needs work. Oddly, that month I was so intent on posting other stuff, too. I fear I work better under deadlines from others, not ones set by me.
I need to put some completed works out there. I still worry about pushing my wordy babies out of the nest and I clutch them too tight, and then no-one can read them.
Books
Goodreads says that I read 100 books and wrote 100 reviews for them. And I'm currently reading another six. At least one of those has to be moved to the ‘did not finish’ pile. I aimed for 75, so that’s good. I always see this as a challenge to myself, not a comparison with other readers. (I follow too many book bloggers who read hundreds in a year and it would be silly to compete with them.)
Podcasts and blogs
I listened to (or watched on YouTube) hours of podcasts from writers and publishers.
Joanna Penn’s site  is the best! And Chuck Wendig’s terrible minds blog is awesome, too.
I kept up with posts from 200 blogs and websites using Feedly - an RSS reader. My only advice on this is: don’t let it get out of hand. Seeing that you have 365 unread articles is terrifying. Feedly displays a headline, a photo and a small part of the article. Enough for you to decide if you wish to read all of it, or save it for later. It’s a pretty neat way to get through a large volume of articles.
Movies and TV
I watched a pile of movies and DVDs, not sure how many. I have a tag on tumblr ‘watched 2014’ but I can’t count them all. Foreign stuff: Death of a pilgrim (Swedish), Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (Chinese), a large pile of anime. British shows: Happy valley, the fall, the tunnel, last tango in Halifax. US shows: the blacklist, agents of shield, true detective, Fargo and Brooklyn99. Best documentary - searching for sugarman
Black Sails, and Arrow were my guilty pleasures.
I make my kids watch what I consider ‘classic movies’ - This year, that included the usual suspects, full metal jacket, the big lebowski (when I told kid 1 it had been included in the preserved historic movies - he said ‘ the dude abides’), once upon a time in America, dead again, speed, galaxy quest, se7en,
Aussie free to air TV did not show the second series of sleepy hollow, elementary and a dozen others. All kudos to ABCtv Australia that, not only showed Doctor Who at the same time as the rest of the world, but repeated it at a sensible viewing hour. If they can do it, the others can.
Music
Concerts have got so expensive, but we did see Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the stone age.
Personal
I bought a vivo fit wearable fitness bracelet and the damned thing tells me I can walk 6km a day. I told it I was old and sedentary, but it isn't listening. It tracks my sleep and I have discovered that I get much less sleep than I thought I did. Huh. 
Maybe more sleep will help everything? Can't hurt... 

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