Friday, December 29, 2006
2006: The writing year that was
There are two days or so until 2006 comes to a close. During the holiday break, I've been reflecting on the past year. And I've been weighing the good and not-so-good in my writing year. I won't say that 2006 wasn't a good year for me professionally, but I had a few goals that I didn't quite reach.
During the year, I had 20-odd articles published. On the other hand, I fell just short of my goal of reaching 200 published articles. But that barrier will be broken early in 2007.
My trip to China last summer gave me a number of article ideas, although I haven't been able to get editors to bite on some of those ideas yet. Luckily, the articles aren't time sensitive and my notes are extensive enough that I have little chance of forgetting the impressions and details. Should my notes fail, I have the recollections of my wife and daughter, as well as our photos, to jog my memory.
I also managed to score an ongoing contract gig writing computer tips for a Web site. The folks behind the Web site seem to like my work and have been paying me, so that's great. I did fail to snag a few of the other contract gigs that I tried for, though. That's always disappointing and a bit demoralizing.
My bread and butter work, technical writing, went fairly well too. During the year, I wrote a lot of documentation as well as a few case studies and a bunch of support documents. Sometimes I felt that the work I did wasn't as good as it could be, but overall it wasn't bad at all.
I'm still annoyed with myself, though, for not making more headway with a couple of my pet writing projects (more on these in a later post). They've been languishing in a state of being partially complete for a while now, and they should be finished. I'm hoping to devote time in January and February to completing them.
All in all, not a bad year. How was 2006 for you? Leave a comment.
During the year, I had 20-odd articles published. On the other hand, I fell just short of my goal of reaching 200 published articles. But that barrier will be broken early in 2007.
My trip to China last summer gave me a number of article ideas, although I haven't been able to get editors to bite on some of those ideas yet. Luckily, the articles aren't time sensitive and my notes are extensive enough that I have little chance of forgetting the impressions and details. Should my notes fail, I have the recollections of my wife and daughter, as well as our photos, to jog my memory.
I also managed to score an ongoing contract gig writing computer tips for a Web site. The folks behind the Web site seem to like my work and have been paying me, so that's great. I did fail to snag a few of the other contract gigs that I tried for, though. That's always disappointing and a bit demoralizing.
My bread and butter work, technical writing, went fairly well too. During the year, I wrote a lot of documentation as well as a few case studies and a bunch of support documents. Sometimes I felt that the work I did wasn't as good as it could be, but overall it wasn't bad at all.
I'm still annoyed with myself, though, for not making more headway with a couple of my pet writing projects (more on these in a later post). They've been languishing in a state of being partially complete for a while now, and they should be finished. I'm hoping to devote time in January and February to completing them.
All in all, not a bad year. How was 2006 for you? Leave a comment.
