Review of my (writing) year

The WordPress elves, monkeys or whatever they are, have produced some rather generic reviews of the year for all my blogs, which are more of interest to me than to anyone else, although I’ve posted one on another blog just to see what it looks like. This blog post is more specifically a review of my writing year and a little glimpse into how I see 2015 going as I unveil my annual writing plan. I’ll start with that.

I’m not sure how it has already managed to acquire the statutory coffee stain! Another familiar feature is the arrow moving something from one part of the year to another, this time before the year has even started.

I am all ready to start on two things tomorrow. One is to attempt to read right through my November NaNoWriMo project without losing the will to live halfway through, and the other, which I hope will be a lot more fun, is to start a new Edwardian story, ‘Adventure at the Palace of Varieties’. I apologise to anyone who might prefer me to write another Pitkirtly mystery first! I’ve been waiting to write the ‘Palace of Varieties’ for quite a few months.

Anyway, that’s for next year! (You can probably tell from the way I’ve approached this blog post that I prefer to look forward than back.)

After resolving at about this time last year not to try and write/publish so much in 2014, I managed to publish 3 novels and my small set of 2 novellas during the year as well as writing the first draft of a novel in November. Looking back at my records, I see there was ‘A Tasteful Crime’ in February, ‘Two Edwardian Adventures’ in late July followed swiftly by ‘The Coronation Quest’ in early August, then  a more sensible gap before ‘The Christmas Puzzle’ in mid-October. Both the latest Pitkirtly mysteries were more successful than I had ever dreamed of, with ‘The Christmas Puzzle’ reaching no. 1 in the cozy mystery category on Amazon UK and hanging around the top 20 for several weeks – it is still in the top 40 at the time of writing this. ‘A Tasteful Crime’ also did very well, but I can’t remember if it actually reached no. 1 or not. I discovered during these times that it takes a lot of sales to stay in the top 5 even of such a relatively small category.

I’m not even going to bother trying not to write so much in 2015. I will just go ahead and write as much as I feel like writing. I have quite a few ideas for writing projects, probably enough to keep me busy long past this time next year, as you may see if you look closely at my writing plan!