I don't necessarily do New Year resolutions every year, but I found myself looking over my records of my writing in 2013, and thinking about how I could improve, and found myself making a whole passel of writing-related resolutions, some vaguer and more tentative than others.

I wrote 296,002 words in 2013, my most productive year since I started keeping detailed records and probably my most productive year ever. At least in terms of word count. It was also pretty productive in terms of finished stories; I finished (at least in first draft) four stories I'd started in 2012 or earlier (one as far back as 2006), and five stories I started in 2013. I started one new story I still haven't finished (another Valentine Divergence story), and continued working on five stories started in earlier years.

It was less productive of stories posted to free fiction sites or submitted to professional book publishers or fiction magazines/websites. I submitted one novel and two short stories to publishers (all rejected). One of my resolutions is to submit more often and more persistently -- to keep re-submitting my non-TG work somewhere else within a week after it's rejected from the last place, until I run out of possible venues.

I only posted two stories to BigCloset in 2013. I plan to post a lot more in 2014, as I revise this backlog of stories finished in first draft but not revised and polished.

I put two novels up for sale on Amazon and Smashwords, which have not earned an impressive amount of money, except for the sheer qualitative fact that people who don't know me from Adam's housecat think my work is worth paying money for. In some sense, there seems to be only a quantitative difference between a self-published author who sells a couple of dozen copies to people who aren't their friends or relations, and a writer who earns a living selling their work to mainstream publishers. I'm planning to post at least two more ebooks for sale on Amazon and Smashwords before I give up on ebook self-publishing.

I worked on three to five non-TG stories in 2013, and twelve to fourteen TG stories -- depending on how I count them. A couple of them have TG elements marginal enough that I can and will submit them to professional zines or book publishers. But in terms of word count, the difference is larger because the TG stories I wrote were preponderantly novels and novellas -- only around 20-30k words out of nearly 300k were non-TG. Another resolution is to write more non-TG work I can submit to publishers; more specifically, to start a new non-TG story for every one I finish, but not necessarily to start a new TG story every time I finish one.

My daily word count goal for 2013 was 700 words, and though I made that goal on less than half the days of the year, I still averaged 811 words per day. (The mean is higher than the median because of a few dozen super-productive days when I wrote thousands of words.) I'm not sure if I should increase that goal, leave it the same, or maybe even decrease it; I think the more ambitious daily word count goal in 2013 (700 words rather than 500 words in the previous few years) contributed not only to my writing more words this year than ever before, but to creating a backlog of first drafts still to be revised.

I wrote nearly every day in 2013 -- I missed only nine days, all in the first three months of the year -- and I plan to write every day in 2014.

Another possible resolution is to do less fanfiction and more in original settings. Roughly half of my word count for the year was fanfiction, mostly for Morpheus's Twisted and Travel Agency universes.

All those goals are quantitative. I feel like I should have some kind of qualitative goals as well -- to get better at plotting or description or some other skill I'm weak on. Where do y'all think my fiction needs to improve?