Happy New Year everyone! Yes I know it’s a little late now. I’ve been a little busy.

I know I haven’t done my usual start of the month blog since September. I didn’t see much point doing one for November and I plain forgot about December until it was a bit too late. This month I thought I’d talk about the whole of the last year and some of my goals for the year ahead.

I wrote a significant word count in 2012 – 184,717 words to be exact. This is over 60k more than 2011. This was just on stories too and doesn’t include the word count for all the blogs I’ve written this year.

Research has been another big thing in the last year. I’ve had to learn about all sorts of things for the current works in progress, ranging from, the best place to hijack the tran Siberian railway and smuggle people off (see Shattered when published) to research into end of the world prophecies (see Sherdan series) and many things in between. I think  anyone looking through my internet history would be mildly concerned if they didn’t know why I just happened to be looking that kind of stuff up.

I’ve published two novels this year, both Chains of Freedom and Sherdan’s Prophecy and all the reviews I’ve had of those two so far have been very positive. There’s definitely a lot of evidence that I’m growing as a writer, which is always a healthy thing.

Future plans include the print version of Sherdan’s Prophecy as well as the eBook of both For Such a Time as This and Sherdan’s Legacy as this years releases. I also hope to finish the first crafts of both my other two works in progress, Shattered, and The Fire of Winter. On top of that I want to start the third book in the Sherdan series and another book which is still totally under wraps for now but involves another writer. I’d like to see how that goes before I do any big announcements.

In terms of word count I’m going to aim to do a little more every month than the matching month year on year to try and hit that illusive 200k word goal. We’ll see how that pans out with my goal to also step up on the marketing in the early parts of this year. I really want to promote the Sherdan series over my other works as I think its my best work by far but it will probably depend on how well I’m feeling. 2012 was a crap year for me health wise and I’ve still got hospital appointments and tests trailing well into this year.

So there’s my work related goals. Anyone else have anything similarly ambitious (or even more so)? Or anyone want to remind me of things I said I’d do that I might have forgotten? Sometimes I forget I wanted to do a project.