Today, I officially stop dinking around with this YA project, and start working seriously on it.

Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up in my face.

It’s hard for me to do the end-of-year writer-meme, because I don’t track exactly how much I’m writing all the time. The best I can do is to say that I wrote about 160K of novel last year — Midnight Never Come, plus about 33K of ANHoD (a back-burner project) and not quite 15K of this YA thing. But that doesn’t count bits and pieces of other things. And I can’t check my short story output because that file isn’t available to me at the moment. And then there’s nonfiction and formal blogging (i.e. things like SF Novelists posts, rather than random crap here), and so on.

I had five short stories hit print (“Execution Morning,” “A Thousand Souls,” “But Who Shall Lead the Dance?,” “Selection,” and “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood”). I sold three. Note for 2008: try to increase short story output. (While also writing more novels? Yes, I recognize the problem here.)

The sad lack is no novel out, since Warrior and Witch got put out so soon after Doppelganger, and settling on Midnight Never Come took so long. But I’ll make up for that: MNC this year, plus a reissue for that first pair.

Anyway. That’s an informal roundup of last year’s writerliness. But rather than dwell on it more, I’m going to go work on the YA.