Writing in 2015

For various reasons, my fiction output has been small.

I didn’t finish the novel, which a year ago I thought was nearly done. What happened was that, as my rewrite approached the end, I realized that the end I had was totally wrong for a novel.

The ending in the zeroth draft was full of implications, which can work great in a short story—the reader ends up knowing that things are going to go a certain way, without the story actually walking them through all the scenes to get there.

A novel is different. Those scenes should be there. As as I started to write them, I realized that things would not go as I’d implied they would. So I would have to figure out the new ending, and write it, and then go back and change a whole bunch of stuff that had set up for the ending I’d previously implied so that it instead would set up for the ending I ended up with.

I haven’t given up on any of that stuff, but I haven’t done it yet either.

I’ve played around with several short stories, but only finished one. It got some pretty good comments from the Incognitos, but I didn’t come away with a good plan for finishing it and submitting it to editors.

I should finish it and submit it. It’s clear in my own mind that no simple rewrite would make it a much better story, so I should just fix the few minor things that readers spotted and get it out to markets—they’ll either buy it or they won’t. But I haven’t yet.

I’ve written quite a bit here on my blog. Since the posts are all right here, I won’t bother linking to them, except to say that my story structure article continues to get the most visits by more than an order of magnitude, and that my post Katy Bowman: The Michael Pollan of movement was by far the most visited this year (because Katy shared it on her Facebook page).

I published three articles at Wise Bread:

Working on the Road: A Book Review for Professional Nomads

Get a Great Workout for Free With 11 Simple Moves

15 Ways to Make Money Outside Your Day Job

Only one of  these articles is a flat-out listicle (which almost everything that Wise Bread publishes these days is), so I consider that a win.

I pitched several other pieces that I think would have made great Wise Bread posts. A couple got turned down by the editors, and a couple got send back with the suggestion that I somehow turn it into a listicle, and I declined to write the article along those lines.

It’s my smallest output at Wise Bread since I started writing for them, but that’s okay. I’ve said most of what I have to say on frugality and personal finance.

My income from writing for Wise Bread is down a lot, but has—much to my surprise—been replaced to a considerable extent with money for teaching taiji.

Taiji (and movement in general) have become more important these past few years, to the point that this year I almost changed the title of my annual review post to “Writing and movement in 2015.” Instead, though, I think I should write a “Movement in 2015” post, which might become an annual tradition of its own.