In 2017, I wrote 146,000 words. Then, in 2018, I wrote an entirely different 146,000 words.
2019, however, I upped my game by twenty-thousand to arrive at a grand total of 166,000 words!
That’s across twenty-three poems, fifty blog posts, essays, reports, memoir, short stories, flash fiction, drabbles, fan fiction, and novel work.
I completed a novel in 2019 – the second in my trilogy – and I wrote a little towards book three. I wrote a children’s picture book. I finished off three fanfic works in progress that had been left abandoned for way too long, and wrote an entirely new fanfic from start to finish at a total of 28,000 words. That’s pretty much a novella.
I shared my children’s book with actual children at an event Liz Weir MBE was doing at the freshly opened Mo Mowlam Park, part of Libraries NI’s Big Summer Read. I read at events part of the Armagh Food & Cider Festival, Belfast Culture Day, and the C.S. Lewis Festival. And I facilitated a short story showcase at Books, Paper, Scissors.
I was one of the recipients of a Kit de Waal Flash Fiction Bursary for the 2019 Bridport Prize.
I won a Margaret Carey Scholarship to attend the 2019 annual SCBWI conference.
I had one poem published in a book, and four poems published in online journals.
I had two short stories published online, with one of them also due to come out in print format later this year.
As I look back on 2019, I could very easily focus on the fact that I didn’t get an agent or a publishing deal for my novel. But just look at all the things I did achieve! It wasn’t the most perfect writing year ever, but I think it might just be my best one yet.
I am feeling good for all that is ahead 🙂
I started 2019 by 
I like to wait until the very last week in December before sharing review posts like this because, if you’re not at the absolute end of the year, who knows what still might happen? Prime example: two days after Christmas last year, my husband and I acquired a dog. This was completely unplanned, to the degree that if you had asked us thirty minutes prior to it happening if we were getting another pet we would have looked at you funny and wondered where you got such an idea.
It took me some time, but I now have a typed record of everything I wrote last year, and I can tell you it all totals one-hundred-and-forty-six-thousand (146,000) words (rounded figure). That equates to a decent sized novel.
There is so much I could say in this post, about lots of good and bad and trying things that have happened this year, but I’ve already spoken about many of those things in lots of different other places, both as they happened and after the fact – yes, I’m a serial reflector, I confess! – and I’m going to cover what I wrote and what I had published in a separate blog post in the new year, so let’s talk resolutions. I started 2017 with six of them:
I want to write an update on life and writing and everything quite literally in between, but I’m having trouble knowing where to start…
Before I let myself get too carried away with excitement for the new year, I thought I should wrap up the one that’s coming to a close. For context and comparison, here is my 
Since re-launching this website way back in January, I have written forty-seven blog posts (including this one). That’s way more than I’ve written, across the three separate blogs I used to run, in the last few years combined.