Short answer ? I wrote about 200k words, which is like two good sized novels. Though I didn’t write novels.
I think that’s the most I’ve ever written. My word count system (putting everything in one Scrivener file) stopped working as I cut and paste stuff back and forth to incorporate edits from beta readers, so, I ended up measuring the final products and not counting some words written.
I’ll firm that system up, or rather, replace it, this year.
The bad news, which will surprise exactly no one who knows anything about writing, is that I made less money than I ever have in my life—the year I spent the most time writing, wrote my longest pieces, and finished four of them.
I sold two shorts to Asimov’s, which was cool. The first has been out for a few weeks… no one has spoken to me about it yet, which I guess, is okay, as nobody has told me I’m a bad person for having written it. So. That’s maybe all I should hope for.
Like my previous story. The Best Man, I’m stumbling about in the minefield of identity politics trying to write stuff that feels true to my spirit, that feels like what I think of SF, that thrums with the moral ambiguities that I think fiction is meant to explore, and that incorporates my own journey parenting two GLBTQ kids. I’m living this diversity moment, from the POV of one of the usual suspects, trying to figure out what my contribution should be.
No consensus has pronounced doom on my efforts to date. Though a few sensitivity readers have gently explained to me that my stuff, ‘isn’t written for them.’ Which is of course, a kind of failure…
Still. I have Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF behind me. For now anyway. This keeps me going.
I wrote three SF novellas set in my Zeitgeist universe, a post-singularity near future. The three novella’s required a timeline, which I built and include a snapshot of above.
This thing for me evokes echoes of Heinlein’s Future History chart, and Larry Niven’s Known Space timelines.
Robert Heinlein’s Future History
My third short story published in Asimov’s, Solomon’s Little Sister, is set in the Zeitgeist timeline, more or less (though it may need tweaking as it was the first one I wrote, before I realized I’d need a timeline.)
It remains to be seen if these novella’s will make it to professional publication… which puts me in this awkward position of reconsidering if I want to keep building out this universe at all.
Nobody is clamoring for more stories of course, after the one.
The Zeitgeist universe is sort of about human motivation in a post-scarcity world, the meaning of life, which is of course mostly a first-world kind of problem? Most people are simply surviving; the meaning of life for many is figuring out how to keep living. Once we have a universal base income, or anything like it, What does life mean?
Of course I still manage to find life and death stakes in this universe.
The stories aren’t boring.
I hope.
