January 1, 2023: 2022 Year in Review

Daily Diary, Day 852:

First off, a hearty Happy New Year to all, with enormous gratitude for all of you who have faithfully read my facebook posts and/or opened my substack emails over the past year. Just knowing you are out there, waiting to hear how my walk went, whether or not I met my exercise or writing goals, or to follow me down the rabbit holes of my research, motivates me each day. I am quite sure I would not have been nearly as successful as I was in meeting my goals for 2022 without you, and I am definitely depending on you to keep me on track to meet my goals for 2023.

At the beginning of 2022 I listed ten goals (some grandiose, some quite modest) and all of them are staying on the list for next year. Therefore, it made sense to me to list each goal, telling you what I did accomplish the goal last year and what I hope to accomplish this coming year. I will start with the more modest and therefore easily obtainable goals first.

To Do List for 2022:

1.     Once my broken toe heals, resume walking for an hour, 5-6 days a week.

This one I accomplished and actually improved upon. The toe took longer to heat than I expected and still hurts if I walk or stand for too long. But by the end of January, I was back walking and slowly built up to 60 mins a day. However, when I read an article that said that cleaning can count as mild exercise, I modified my goal to trying to average 90 minutes of exercise a day, including both walking and cleaning. This will remain a goal for 2023. Knowing that I will be writing these daily posts and wanting to find interesting photographs to add to the posts, has really helped motivated me. As a result, I am getting much more regular exercise than I have ever gotten in my life.  In addition, this 90 minutes or so of exercise a day has played an important role in helping achieve the next goal.

2.     Continue to read/listen to more fiction for pleasure.

Ever since I started writing full-time, I found I was carving out less and less time for reading for pleasure. As a life-long and voracious reader, I knew this was not good for me. There is a reason for the proverb, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Before this 2022, I had begun to look for short story anthologies to download to my Kindle, because I found this form one the best ways to ensure I was doing at least some recreational reading, if only for the half-hour in bed before we turned the lights out. However, I had just discovered at the end of 2021 that I actually enjoyed listening to audiobooks while I walked and cleaned, particularly listening to books by favorite mystery authors. Consequently, in 2022, this became my major form of recreational reading. Reading (or listening) to fiction will remain a goal for 2023.

3.     Continue to keep connected to family and friends through texting, phone calls, emails.

Anyone who has read my daily posts knows that I spend a good deal of time on the phone. Since my particular health issues, plus the continued surges of Covid and other viruses, has meant that I am still staying away from travel or spending any time in enclosed spaces, the phone has been the primary way I have stayed connected with people. The frequency of these calls has kept me from feeling isolated and has been an important part of maintaining my emotional well-being. The additional benefits of modern technology have helped. For example, I have been able to stay involved in an organization that is important to me through a weekly zoom meeting, and texting, even when it is simply sharing links or sending emojiis, helps me keep in daily contact with my daughter.

4.     Get someone to work on landscaping changes—including new sidewalk that is wheel chair accessible.

My husband and I are not gardeners. We never have been. My moto has been, any plant that withstands our neglect, gets to stay, and that goes for some weeds that have blooms and aren’t too ugly. Our only goal in the back yard is not to let the lower yard become so denuded of grass that the dirt and mud is constantly tracked in. Since I started walking, and found how much pleasure I get out of looking at other people’s yards, I also decided that we should pay some attention to making our front yard at least look neat (ie get rid of the weeds.) Finally, the roots to a gigantic pine that we had to remove as it started to list towards the house (and was a fire hazard), had seriously buckled our front sidewalk, making it a safety hazard. So, while having it redone, we decided to widen it in case we needed it to be wheel chair accessible. (Having just broken my toe, I was especially aware that I, at least, was one bad fall away from needing this, if only temporarily.)  So, we had a major clean up of weeds in the front yard, new sidewalk installed, and new grass put in (with wire mesh that was supposed to keep the gophers at bay.) We post-poned doing any new planting because it was summer and not optimum time for any new plants.

A summer of drought and a very persistent gopher has undermined the lush green of the new turf in the back yard, but at least it isn’t muddy. And a whole new crop of weeds sprouted up in the front yard this week after the rains came. As a result, keeping the front yard weed-free and getting some of the new planting done before summer will now become the new goal for 2023.

5.     Get information on redoing bathrooms and get at least one bathroom remodeled this year.

This was another goal directed at our hope that we can age in place. While we did finally get an estimate about how much remodeling the bathrooms will take, this only happened last month. And the day the contractor came to give us the estimate turned out to be the same day we had to go and buy a used EV to replace our 2007 Prius after its catalytic convertor was stolen. Turned out the cost of the bathroom remodel was about the same as the cost of the EV, so there is a very good possibility this goal will be kicked down the road some more. So, I will keep remodeling the bathrooms as a 2023 goal. This will motivate me to write, publish, and market my books so I can build our savings back up to accomplish this goal.

6.     Maintain a schedule of writing 500-1000 new fiction words a day, at least 5 days a week.

During 2022 I wrote a novella that clocked in at slightly over 38,000 words and I am 100,000 words into a new novel. Just out of curiosity, I figured out what my average word count per week was when I was writing both of these manuscripts (not counting editing, rewriting, etc.)  For the novella, Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime, I started writing March 2 and ended the first draft June 10. This meant I averaged slightly over 2,500 words a week. I started writing the current work in progress, Tides of Acerba, on July 24, and this means I have been averaging 4,347 words a week. Of course, there was the nearly a month and a half between the completion of the first draft of Mrs. Stein and when I started working on the Tides of Acerba, when I wasn’t “writing,” but was instead editing the novella while getting ready to write the next book. However, that is probably the fastest turn-around in terms of ending one project and starting the next that I’ve ever done!

I think what helped me increase my word count with this recent book, so that I actually started reaching the high end of the goal (5000 words a week) was 1) my decision to concentrate on a weekly goal, rather than a daily goal, 2) starting my weekly count on Saturdays, which are more likely to be free of phone calls, and 3) using NoMoWriMo to help me prioritize the novel writing. 

For 2023, I hope to maintain that 5000 words a week goal, plus the quick turn-around in finishing one project and moving on to the next. I will discuss the actual manuscripts I hope to write next year under the next goal.

7.     Write and publish Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime (either as short story or novella). Put together Dandy stories and publish as an anthology.  Rewrite the short story, Yesterday’s News, (and publish on Kindle Vella.) Finish the science fiction novella I am writing with my daughter (publish on Vella.) Write at least one more new Victorian short story. Plan and start next full-length mystery novel.

On one hand, this is one of the goals I ended up modifying over the course of the year. When I wrote this list, my last full-length mystery novel, Entangled Threads, was due to be published on January 25. The first thing I did that month was write the introduction to and publish a compilation of the stories featuring the Boston Terrier, calling it Dandy’s Daring Deeds. I also spent a little time that month looking at a short story, called Yesterday’s News that I had written for a workshop a couple of years ago. The tentative plan was to expand it to be a novella and experiment with serializing it on Kindle’s Vella. At the same time, I started doing the research for Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime, not sure if it would be a short story or novella. By mid-February, I decided that I wasn’t impressed enough with how Vella was working for writers in terms of income, while at the same time I was getting more excited about the Mrs. Stein story, so I stopped working on Yesterday’s News. (I still like the story, and maybe I will work on it sometime in the future, but not now.)

As you all know, I did in fact successfully write and publish Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime.

However, in the month when I was waiting for beta readers to get back to me on the first draft of that novella, I started rereading the Science Fiction trilogy (Caelestis series) that I had completed in 2017. The purpose was to get me back into the Paradisi Chronicles world so I could start back working on the sequel to the novella, The Stars are Red Tonight, that I co-wrote with my daughter and was part of the Paradisi Chronicles universe. I had started working on that novella right when Covid hit, got 40,000 words into it and hit a wall. Like Yesterday’s News, I like the story, and I do want to finish it, but rereading the Caelestis series got me so excited about those characters and the stories I felt I had left to write about them, that I jettisoned working on the novella sequel, jettisoned thinking about the next full-length mystery novel, and started working on what has become the Tides of Acerba.

So, I definitely did achieve my goal of publishing Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime and the anthology, Dandy’s Daring Deeds. I jettisoned the two works I thought I might put on Vella, but I came up with a project that I am quite pleased with, finishing the Caelestis series books.

To that end, my writing and publishing goals for 2023 are to complete and publish book four in that series, Tides of Acerba, and write and publish book five in that series, tentatively entitled In Ddaera’s Embrace. If all goes well, I also hope to write another Dandy short story for next holiday season and start to work on the plot for the next full-length Victorian San Francisco Mystery series for 2024.

8.     Evaluate marketing expenses, and decide where to concentrate on improving marketing. Continue to build audiobook following and increase revenue stream.

By the end of 2021, when I came up with this goal, I was very aware that my overall revenue (total royalties) was almost half of what it had been in 2020. While the most obvious cause for this was that in 2020 I had published Lethal Remedies, my 7th novel in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series (to very strong sales and reviews) as well as three short stories. In 2021, I had not published a single book (although I was just about to publish Entangled Threads.)

One of the few things that most writers, particularly indie authors, agree on is that the best tool for marketing is publishing new books. And the publication of Entangled Threads and Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime did, in fact, increase my income from ebook sales by about $7000.

Thank goodness, because the overall sales of my backlist books has continued to decline, particularly for the last half of the 2022. I was not alone in seeing this drop in sales, and one of the reasons appears to be rapid erosion of the effectiveness of standard advertising methods for indie authors. If you are interested in the universality of this, you might read the latest post by Kris Rusch, which starts out with the heading: 2022: The year that advertising stopped working.

I had already seen signs of this, particularly with Facebook ads, and so I decided to narrow my goals for 2022 to use my advertising money to 1) ensure that my first in series books were promoted enough to stay visible in their main Amazon categories, which I did.  The second goal was to work to increase visibility of my audiobooks through promotions (which don’t cost any money upfront, but come from a percentage taken from royalties.) That was definitely successful, since I made $2300 more in audiobooks sales in 2022 than I had the year before.

My goal for 2023 is to continue concentrating my efforts in marketing on getting more books published, investing most of my ad dollars in launching those new books and promoting the free first in series books, and advertising my audiobooks.

9.     Continue to write daily diary entries on Facebook

I definitely did achieve this goal, not missing a single day, however, starting in April I modified this goal to include posting these daily entries on substack.com. There were numerous reasons for this decision, and if you want a brief recap of these reasons, you might check out the post on my Website, entitled “A Blog about why I am going to stop Blogging.”

In many ways this shift was also part of re-evaluating my marketing strategy at the beginning of 2021. However a thorough review of how the development of two substack newsletters, An Aging Author’s Daily Diversions for my daily posts, and M. Louisa Locke’s Monthly Newsletter to replace the promotional letter I used to send out, deserve much more analysis than I can devote in this post (which h

as grown very long!). So, this is a promise that I will continue in 2023 to do my daily entries on Facebook, but that I will also continue to post on substack as well as experiment with how I use substack in the coming year. But look for a more extended analysis on my goals for substack in the next few weeks.

10.  Live a life of joy, serenity, and love.

 This was my 10th goal, and I needed to keep this in mind, because in 2022 there were far too many deaths among my extended family as well as the death of a very close friend. But I can definitely say that working to fulfill the other nine goals, and having you all as witnesses to that activity, has made all the difference. 2022 was, indeed, despite the losses a year of joy, general serenity and love. So, I will continue to strive to live this kind of life in 2023.

Thanks so much with bearing with me through this long post, and Happy New Year!!!