2014 Is In the Rear View Mirror

Our look back in wonder at 2014 probably should have been posted last week, but this way it will stand out from all the other “year in review” posts around the internet. It’s not procrastination, it’s a feature!

We started off 2014 with a newly reorganized blog. I’m pleased to say we did such an excellent job with it that it was unnecessary to do it again this year! In other organizational news, we also launched our Stichomancy Writing Prompt Generator.

In February we were busily editing the Music Novel, and were rather obsessed with its high word count. That early in the process we were still adding new material, filling the holes our beta readers demanded we fill, so the count kept rising.

In March we introduced the newest member of Team Skelley, the very distracting Lady Marzipan. As you can see, she’s a bit bigger now, but is still quite a distraction.

Lady Marzipan makes sure we take frequent forays from the writing cave to walk around the neighborhood and sniff all the mailboxes. We use the time in between smells to discuss whatever’s going on in our fiction, which in March was a lot of editing of the Music Novel.

April brought posts about the other work we had in play, the Science Novel. Our critique group was working their way through it which meant that we had to switch gears once a week from being deep in the guts of the Music Novel to remembering what the hell we’d even written in the Science Novel. To escape the stress we ran away to Europe for a quick, frigid vacation.

In May we couldn’t stop talking about how much fun we had in Prague, and the various ways we were distracted.

June brought the startling realization that the Music Novel has swelled to a whopping 187,000 words. Yikes! Time to start winnowing it back down again.

So that’s just what we spent July doing.

On August 1 we were thrilled to announce that we were done with edits on the Music Novel! As of today, our critique group is just about done with it, which means that we’ll have another round of edits coming up soon.

September found us deep in contemplation about where our writing would go in the future. We lamented not being in “writing mode” for quite a while.

We spent October editing the last book in our Trilogy, which prompted much thought about writing advice, both good and bad.

November is National Novel Writing Month, of which we still do not approve.

Come December we were finishing up edits on the Trilogy, doing a final reading of the Science Novel, and warming up for (gasp!) marketing.

So, it was a year where not a whole lot of composition happened. We kept our writing muscles limber with writing prompts, but the majority of our time was spent editing. That’s the part of writing a lot of people don’t take into account. It’s not enough to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Once the words exist, you have to poke them with sticks, gouge them with forks, and occasionally set them on fire.

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for 2015. Happy New Year (a week late) everyone!