Well, it’s a new year, and I LOVE new years!!!! ^_^
The beginning of a new year always makes me feel GREAT! I get super motivated and super excited to make new goals and new plans, to get rid of the old and welcome in the new!
So I made my 2022 goals list, and I was all pumped to share them. And then I suddenly hit the brakes and thought, “Hang on a second. You’re so terrible at stopping to think about all the things you’ve accomplished in the PAST year… why don’t you take a minute to think about that, and acknowledge those things, and appreciate the progress you’ve made so far? THEN you can look forward to your 2022 plans.”
And then I said to myself, “Hey Self, that is a FABULOUS idea. You’re right. I SHOULD do that!”
And so I did. And as I took some quiet moments to reflect back on 2021, I realized that I did a whole lot more stuff that year than I’d realized! AND I couldn’t believe that some of those things had actually still happened in 2021, as they felt like they’d happened AGES ago. O_o Suffice to say that for me at least, 2021 was apparently an even LONGER year than 2020. WHEWIE.
But despite that, 2021 is over now, and it really was a great year all around for me and my family, turns out, (mostly) despite the pandemic still ongoing, and despite suffering some very sad losses. (We lost a special needs kitten I’d taken care of all through 2020 at 7 months old in January, my husband’s grandfather at 96 years old in February, and our bestest sweetest cat of 16.5 years in June. OUCH.)
There were MOST CERTAINLY some very low points during 2021, and if there’s one thing the pandemic + all those losses have been teaching me, it’s the great, GREAT importance of self-care and the grieving process as a whole. I’ve definitely been getting better over these last two years about taking care of my mental health! I hope you’ve been trying to do the same! <3
And with that noted, here are some highlights from my 2021:
>> Wrote a total of 138,629 new words (+ some, because this is not counting words that were added when going through any draft edits, but that’s just too complicated to track, so I don’t bother. These words here are pure drafting words!)
>> Presented two talks (Successful Self-Editing for Fiction Authors and Writing Cinematic Fiction) for Audrey Hughey’s The Author Transformation Alliance’s Spring Retreat! These seemed to be well received, hooray! Though both of these workshops have been in the works for a LONG while, this was my first opportunity to present them, so I’m glad the trial run was a success! If either of these sound interesting to YOU also, I WILL be offering these workshops again at some point in the future. You can shoot me a note at jrfrontera@gmail.com with the subject line “WORKSHOP WAITING LIST” and I’ll be sure to let you know when that happens!
>> Participated in two panels for QuaranCon 2021 (When Series Get Epic and Indie Flavours – Find Your Publishing Path), which was a blast! I’d never done an online panel before, but we had a lot of fun! The panel titles above link to the recorded videos on YouTube if you want to check either of those out, or browse QuaranCon’s many other fantastic panel offerings while you’re there!
>> With the help of my fantastic Virtual Assistant, Charity, I was able to FINALLY create my custom Editing Workbook! This has also been in the works for… well, YEARS, but with her help, it finally became a reality! I used this brand-spanking-new workbook just this year when editing BONES IN BLACKBIRD, and it performed beautifully. At least for me. (I WAS the one who created it, after all, after years of learning exactly what I needed to track during my own novel edits.) But if you think you might want to try it out yourself, you can find a video walkthrough of its basics HERE, and then check it out on Lulu right HERE! (And yes, coil-bound for ultimate convenience and comfort!)
>> Built my Discord server into my favorite place on the Internet!!! <3 This year was the first year I really had a good reason to use the Discord server I’d created long ago just to chat to a friend while gaming. Well… then I met more people to game with, so the server actually became useful lol. We started using it every week to play Red Dead Online together with… and since then, it’s grown to a whopping 32 people. (Which is frankly, shocking to me.) Sure, most of those people are merely lurkers, but still. I started this year with about 5 people on the server, sooooo. It’s still surprising. Even more crazy is the fact that a handful of those people read my books… and REALLY LIKE THEM. YAY!!! I still have to pinch myself almost every day as it often seems too good to be true… but I love hanging out with these people SO MUCH. We just have so much fun together, I’m so happy to have that wonderful place all to ourselves, free of stupid algorithms and endless ads! YAY!!! I have plans to bolster the Discord even more in 2022, get it real nice and organized (I still have much to learn about Discord bots, for example), and then I’ll open it up to more people. But I’m capping the server at 100 people max, period, for all time… so if you think you might want to join our shenanigans… watch this space!! Or send me an email at jrfrontera@gmail.com and call it “DISCORD INVITE?” and I’ll get you on THE LIST. 😀
>> Wordwraith Books (my publishing company) had our most successful Planet Comic Con EVER this year. I mean… we blew our previous sales numbers out of the water!!! This is likely due to the fact there was no PCC in 2020, and people were ready to come out and enjoy themselves and spend some money, and possibly also because we had MANY more books on offer this year (a total of 27, to be exact!)… but whatever the reason… I won’t complain! We were busy almost non-stop at our table all three days of the con, and though exhausting, we had an absolutely wonderful time! We also hosted two panels: Self-Publishing 101, which proved to be just as popular as always, and My Research History is Interesting, all about the bizarre happenings of researching for novels, lol, which was a brand new one we’d never done before, but people seemed to really enjoy it! Hooray!
>> Gave over the reins for my 3-year-old Facebook group Epic Fantasy > Romantic Authors to the amazing ladies of Romantic Fantasy Shelf… so we ware all one big happy group now, and EFRA is getting archived. Of all the things that happened this year, I think this one is the one that really boggles my mind the most. I won’t get into all the nitty gritty here as it’s a story in and of itself, but when I started EFRA, I did it because I couldn’t find any romantic fantasy books on Amazon, or any other authors writing in that genre. A few years later and the group had over 300 members, and Romantic Fantasy is now an actual category on Amazon!!! Because of all the amazing authors who came together in EFRA. And not only that, but some of those authors went above and beyond for the genre, creating the reader-centric FB group Romantic Fantasy Shelf and its related website and author-centric group Romantic Fantasy Shelf Authors. Everything they do, all the traction they’ve made… still just blows my mind. And I absolutely love knowing that it was my little handful of romantic fantasy authors in EFRA that started that ball rolling! <3 I think to this day this is probably one of the things I’ve done that I’m most proud of… despite the fact my romantic fantasy series still isn’t even written yet, hah! But I’ve never had anything I was ever a part of snowball like that before, so it’s nice to be able to have something so incredible as RFS now!!
>> I wrote a 142,000 word book in 8 months, which is not remarkable for some indie authors, but for me… this is great! Especially considering I had my husband and son home with me 24/7 for all of 2021…
>> I then edited all those words twice over and published that book, all within the same year! (And it ended up at 148,000 words, eep.) The “me” of even just a few years ago would have crapped herself to hear this. Definitely getting faster at this process, so that’s good news!
>> Took 4 road trips in our new camper!! Two were just “local” float trips during the summer; we didn’t leave my home state for those. But the other two were week-long vacations – one to Texas (do not recommend lol) and one to Wisconsin (DO recommend). We mostly had a blast (I’ll have to tell you about the Texas trip sometime)… but regardless, it was nice to get out of the house, travel, see new places and experience new things! We loved it! And I absolutely am soooo in love with our little camper!!
>> Edited 1 client novel and booked more for 2022! I’ve been trying to dial this back to make more room for my own writing, and that worked well for 2021. I plan to continue the sparse client edits through this next year… but I do still want to take on a few new authors now and then, so if you’re looking for an editor, don’t hesitate to reach out and I’ll see if I have room for you! 🙂
>> I started another co-written funny space opera project, this one about a boy band … IN SPACE!!! Lol. Yeah, it’s been a good time! I’m working on this one with fellow author and friend Jamie Davis, and he’s got LOTS of cool books under his belt! So be sure to check him out! For now, this project of ours (N’SPACE) is only on the new Kindle Vella. We’ll see how it does there, and we might later release these books on regular ol’ Kindle. Book 1 is already complete, and we’re currently working on book 2! This fun series will be a collection of standalone novellas, essentially, all following the adventures of the boy band N’SPACE as they travel the stars on their galactic tour… but of course… nothing goes as planned… oops. O_o
>> Wrote two more bonus short stories in the Lucky Logan universe, and started two more short stories… also both in the Lucky Logan world.
>> Attended 20BooksVegas and had a fabulous time catching up with so many author friends old and new!! This year was really all about catching up and making new friends and new connections, and in that sense, it was a great success! I just had so much fun!
>> While in Vegas, I also met up with three of my readers, who I am now good friends with thanks to my Discord server, as previously mentioned. They came all the way out to Vegas to see me!!! <3 Well, and also to ride horses, hehe. We hung out, ate lots of good food together, and went riding through the desert together. It was a BLAST and I can’t wait to do it again!
>> Another reason those readers came out to Vegas was for the author signing I participated in after the 20Books conference was over. I’ll say I did better than I was expecting as far as book sales/book swaps, so that was cool. (Mind you, I had ZERO expectations going in lolol.) It was my first major author signing, and afterward I found out our group of only indie authors actually sold more books than the Barnes and Noble Book Expo had in Vegas a few months previous. Ha!
>> And finally and most importantly… FINALLY, FINALLY, at long last, after going on nine years of self-publishing… I feel like I just might have a handle on things and know what the f#$% I’m doing! Can you believe it!? Haha. Maybe others have figured it out long before me… but for me personally… only now do I feel comfortable and confident. I know what I love to write. I know how to write that well. I know what makes good craft and good covers and good copy. I know how to research or judge reader expectations. I know how to sort the good advice from the bad. I know what processes work best for me, and which processes work against me. I know my strengths and weaknesses and am getting better at building systems to support my strengths and make up for my weaknesses.
FINALLY! ^_^
And there you have it! My 2021 accomplishments in a nutshell! I’m so glad I took the time to reflect back on the past year and write these down, as I’m quite sure I would have soon forgotten about most of them. 😛 Even just waiting almost a year to think about them had me almost forgetting about the things I did in January – March, eep!
How was your last year? What are some of the positive things you took out of it, or some of the good to come out of it? What are some of the best things, in your opinion, that you managed to accomplish? Or some of the great adventures you went on? I’d really love to hear about them, so be sure to let me know in the comments!
For now, I’d better be going… I have a whole lot more planned for 2022, so there’s no time to waste! But we’ll get to all that next time…
You certainly made the best of a crazy Covid year! I’m so happy to hear the good news!