May 2016 Goals in Review

Okay! So I’ve had about a month off from this whole blogging thing, aside from sharing videos and the IWSG post from yesterday…so what have I been up to as far as goals? Let’s take a look!

Goal #1. Take good care of myself, specifically by walking 10,000 steps a day and taking at least 15 minutes per day to do something fun/relaxing.

This was probably my worst goal of the month, although it wasn’t as horrible as that first statement makes it sound.

Right off the bat, I came nowhere near 10,000 steps per day. It was actually an average of 7481 steps per day in May, and I only had 6 days that actually broke the 10k barrier. That’s my worst average and my fewest 10k days yet this year. So that’s a bit depressing, but there’s a bit of a…well, I guess you’d call it an excuse, but it’s kind of a good one. I’ve been out of work since the fires began in Fort McMurray. That means, basically, that I’ve had no reason to be up and walking around. At home I write, do a variety of things that involve sitting at a computer, and play with my daughter, so there’s not a lot of opportunity to work those steps in. There were a few days when I went for runs, and those were the ones that I did hit 10k. So, I guess, all in all, I don’t feel so bad about the numbers I wound up with here, because it’s a bit circumstantial. Yeah, I totally should have gone out for more runs and got those numbers up, but I’ve been focusing on other stuff so I don’t feel particularly guilty, to be perfectly honest.

As far as my 15-minutes-a-day…in a way this was the best month, and in another way it was the worst. It was the best because there was literally not one day when I didn’t manage to work in at least 15 minutes of some kind of relaxation. It was the worst because the overwhelming majority of those relaxation periods involved browsing 9gag or playing Sailor Moon Drops on my phone. I really have to start reading or something again. >.>

Goal #2. Build readership/viewership by putting more focus and energy into my blog posts, shooting fun and different YouTube videos, and putting more effort into self-promotion.

As far as YouTube goes, we’ve got this thing by the horns. My husband has been an amazingly huge help at building my brand and taking care of the editing process, and as a result we are almost up to 2000 subscribers, plus I’ve been increasing in subs on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and (newly) SnapChat. Plus we recently started a Facebook group called Basement Geeks for people to just hang out and be geeky together, and that really seems to be taking off as well. We posted 15 videos throughout May, and those videos combined have garnered 7860 views as of this date. Not too shabby at all!

On the book side of things we’re still basically dead in the water. I recently got some good advice from a fellow published author that I might put into effect in the near(ish) future, and I did attempt a very small (*cough*cheap*cough*) ad campaign, but no luck really. I got one sale and about 500 pages read via Kindle Unlimited, which nets me about…$2. Ha.

Goal #3. Write as much as I can, including writing an entire novel from start to finish.

This is the one that I’m most happy about this month. As you guys probably know I’ve – at least temporarily – quit regular blogging as a way to gain more time to write fiction, and thus far it’s working quite well. I managed to go through and do a bunch of edits to The Other World, Book One, and now that manuscript is off with my two lovely beta-readers. Once that was out of my hand I got to work on two separate projects: The Other World, Book Two, and the first book of a “Fairy Tails” series that I’m starting (yes, the spelling of “tails” is intentional).

Looking at the numbers, this past month I wrote 1302 words toward the blog, 3426 in my personal journal, 3139 words in random non-fiction stuff, and 5854 fiction words, for a total of 13,721 words. That’s not a lot of words, and I think it might be the least words I’ve written in a month so far this year, but it also represents words that were written while getting stuff done. Know what I mean? I know you know what I mean.

So all in all, I’m happy with this goal, and my mini-goal for the month of June is to make sure I write something absolutely every day, even if it’s just scribbling random stupidness in my notebook. Wish me luck!