Happy New Year! part 1 - Look back at 2015

Well, so the second half of December just blew right by me. We went out of town the weekend before Christmas, for an early Christmas with our son and his family in their new house, then I came home with the worst cold I've had in years and was basically on survival mode through Christmas and the end of the year. Finally getting better, though the gunk is going to be hanging around for a while.

The result is that it's been more than two weeks since my last post and I haven't been around much on TweetFace either, so this is to assure anyone who's interested that yes, I'm still around and still working on the books. The revision of For the Wildings is progressing, slower than it might have been because I've committed to also writing new stuff every day, but it's coming along. Still can't say when it'll be released; it's up over 70,000 words now, by far the longest book of the series, and I've got several phases of editing left to go. I want to make it as good as I can, and I think (hope!) it'll be worth the wait.

Before going on with my goals and plans for this year, I wanted to take stock of what I accomplished last year. I published 4 novels (books 2-5 of Daughter of the Wildings), wrote 1 (Heir of Tanaris), and also wrote a couple of short stories. Late in October, I recommitted to writing new words every day, and ended the year with a total word count of 85,772. Heir of Tanaris was most of that, clocking in at 80, 272, the longest novel I've written in quite some time (longer than any of the Daughter of the Wildings books). One of the stories I wrote (Rescue From Suburbia) is here for you to read; the other, I'm saving to be published in a collection. For the seventh year in a row, I successfully completed NaNoWriMo, finishing November with 52,844 words written on Heir of Tanaris.

As far as reading, on Goodreads I set a goal to read 25 books and ended up reading 62! Ok, some of them were stories and short novels/novellas, but others were very long. I've got one more mega Reading Roundup post to do for last year's reading; lots of good books to recommend!

So that's the look back at 2015; time to go write now. Next up: what's coming in 2016! Some cool stuff and new directions.

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