2012 Retrospective

I was about to begin this post with some banal cliché about what a crazy year it’s been, or what a difference a year makes, or something similar, when it occurred to me that such thoughts were, well, banal and clichéd. It’s a curious habit we have: taking stock of the past 364 (or in this case, 365) days and asking ourselves how things are different. Life changes on a dime, and what difference does it really make where that change happens on the calendar? My life about came to an end almost four years ago with my wife’s cancer diagnosis. Every day since then has been a gift of sorts (still cancer free going on four years!).

Not a lot has changed for us here in the Scott home. I still have the same job I had last year. Same schedule. Same house. Everyone’s a year older. My daughter is now leading worship at our home church, but that’s only been going on for about six weeks now.

We’re still having the same sorts of arguments and disagreements and disagreeableness in a house filled with teenagers that we were last year. Things are a little smoother in some ways, but not so much that I could say things are radically different. The economy still sucks. Politics still suck. And our American culture shows continual signs of severe distress. Life goes on, even as it feels like it’s getting worse all around.

I began this post with the intention of talking about my writing/publishing career, and now it seems it’s taken a more serious tone. Apologies for that.

What’s changed… Well, I have more books available now than I did this time last year. I had just finished Spilled Milk, and Eye of Darkness remained a future hope. The Lost Scrolls came out this year, so that’s good. I now have two more completed novels I’ll be releasing soon (and The Elixir of Life, the sequel to The Lost Scrolls, is due out in Spring), and one more that will be completed shortly (In the Widening Gyre). At the end of 2011, I’d sold 344 books for the year, at an average rate of 29 books a month. I made about $371 on books that year. As of 2012, I’ve sold 1106 books for the year, at an average rate of 92 books per month, and earned about $1,625 for the year. Of course, that includes the major sale in September, which I’ve yet to duplicate. The actual average is about 38 books per month. Still an improvement, but hardly enough to live on.

I’ve now finished nine novels. Soon to be ten.

I think this next year, I want writing to be fun again. These past few months it’s taken on such a push (both the heavy September marketing and the NaNoWriMo contest in November being largely responsible), that I want to back off a bit and have more fun doing this. What’s the point if I’m not enjoying it? Especially given the nature of the world at large to show such signs of rot. I write because I need to – not because I have some kind of message to give (Jefferson’s Road notwithstanding), but because I need the escape from it all, perhaps just as much as my readers (now in excess of 31,000 books being read – that’s new!) need the escape as well. And, of course, there’s always the possibility that I’ll get “discovered,” or that something radical will happen, and my books will take off – thus changing our lives permanently.

Well, one can always hope.

Happy New Year.