Hello everyone!
This year has been one of many ups and downs. Some really great things have happened to me and my family, but we’ve also had some tragedies. Overall, I’d say that 2019 has been a good year, but I am ready to welcome 2020.
Something that I learned in 2019 is that life can get crazy really quickly, and that it is important to have a backup plan for when that happens.
When I started blogging back in 2016, I tried to pump out blog posts on a weekly basis, but I didn’t know anything about writing a blog, and the content I produced was terrible. As I learned what makes a good blog post, I realized that putting out a quality post takes time and isn’t something I can commit to doing every week. That was when I changed my posting schedule to one blog post every two weeks, which, for the most part, I was faithful in doing…until the 2019 craziness hit.
Whenever it was a blog post week, I would ask myself what was inspiring me or what I wanted to learn about, and then I’d spend several hours researching, writing, and editing. That method worked until this year. When the 2019 craziness hit and I got overwhelmed, I didn’t feel inspired to write and I didn’t have the energy to do research. As a result, I missed several blog posts and was late with others. I am not proud of my blogging frequency for 2019, so I asked myself, “What am I going to do so that I post consistently in 2020?” The answer: Pre-planning. (I know, I should have been pre-planning all along, but I have always been a procrastinator, and it wasn’t until 2018 that I finally decided to start pre-planning and outlining my books. I hadn’t gotten around to applying that epiphany to my blog.)
I sat down and wrote out the months of the year. Then, I looked up holidays, seasonal events, and writers’ birthdays. Using that as inspiration, I came up with two or three themes that I wanted to cover for each month in 2020. I look forward to returning to posting regularly and am proud that I found a way that will work for me to meet my blogging goals.
One theme that seems to repeat itself in my life is this: You will never get everything right, but if you learn from your mistakes, you can do better next time.
If there is an area in your writing, or in any part of your life, that you are not satisfied with, I would encourage you to honestly evaluate that area to find out what you can do to improve it. Then, make and implement a plan. The first plan might fail. That’s okay. You’re moving in the right direction. Keep re-evaluating and trying new things until you find what works for you. You only fail when you stop trying.
Caveat: Unless a plan bombs so badly that you know there is no way it will ever work, give the plan four to eight weeks of a fair try before you discard it for a new one. New habits take time to form, so give yourself the time you need.
Happy writing!
Katie
My second mistake, which I technically made years ago when I started writing The Four Crystals, was not reading a variety of fantasy books before I started writing one. Up until this year, I didn’t understand that there is a difference between fantasy and fairy tales. After all, they both have magic, fairies, elves, dwarves, and quests. Some of my writer friends kindly alerted me to the fact that The Four Crystals, which I wrote to be a fantasy novel, read more like a fairy tale – probably because I have read so many fairy tales and fairy tale spinoffs. Once I learned that there was a difference, I started reading fantasy novels to get a feel for what beats I would need in my novel. I also needed to figure out which fantasy clichés I had accidentally put in my novel. (The wise old mage working with the know-nothing teenage boy might have been one of them.)
Things I have learned from this year’s mistakes:
katiemerkelwriter 