This morning a video dropped on my YouTube channel wrapping up my goals and progress for January 2020. I’ll embed the video at the end of this post but for now, let’s take a look at some insider information.
2020 Goals
I walked through each of the 2020 goals in my video. I don’t have much to add to their progress so let’s just give you a couple of fun facts from behind the scenes, shall we?
- I hate the sound of my own voice. Blame years of teasing for the fact that my voice happens to be a little deeper in tone than your “average” female, if you’d like. But I hate my voice. Add to that the fact that video tends to drop the register of your voice and oh being on camera is tough for me. So I hired a video editor, someone who doesn’t hate the sound of my voice. It’s made my life a lot easier when I don’t have to listen to my videos multiple times to edit and trim.
- Distractions reigned on this particular filming. This video you’ll get to see is actually the second full attempt. The first one was plagued with cars driving by, my dog barking, my cell phone getting alerts, and even my neighbor walking up his side yard. We gave up, went to dinner, had a glass of wine, and came back to try again.
Actual Numbers
The video itself focused on my goals and how those broke down. But let’s take a look at some other numbers. You may have noticed that I didn’t set January word count goals. In 2020 I plan to keep myself focused exclusively on these year long goals. In other words, that was not an accident. I’m trying something new.
- 32288 total words (as of today). This is not a bad start to 2020. In fact, I’m quite happy with this number.
- My highest writing day was January 1 when I hit over 3500 words in a single day. I actually came close to that number on January 14th when I hit 3300.
- Overall 10 days were over 1500 words and another 4 days were over 1000 words.
- I averaged just over 1200 words per day.
Statistics
On the video you’ll hear the total number of books and pages I read, but I didn’t drop any specific reading statistics. Let’s take a look at some of those together.
- 25% of what I read in January was written by male authors. This is a HUGE discrepancy from what I saw in 2019, when I was pretty evenly split. This was not intentional. I’m not sure yet if this is something I’ll work to remedy.
- The genre breakdown for January was interesting. Contemporary is not something that normally dominates my reading lists. While I read it, we all know I normally read a lot of mystery/thriller (which it tied with) and fantasy (which came in fourth). But even more shocking, perhaps, is that romance category. For romance to make a jump up to 3rd, you know it was a strange month. Although maybe all of that explains this…
- It’s been a long time since I’ve had a month where I only read 1 5-star book. This month was the one. Now, admittedly, there was a large chunk (almost 47%) earning 4-stars. 20% were 3-star or niche audience. But 4 books (about 26%) were problematic or simply not for me. That’s highly unusual for me.
One more fun fact for you…
- 50% of what I read this month was independently published.
To Sum it Up
- I made progress toward most of my year long goals
- I read a lot of books across various genres
- I wrote a decent amount of words
I’m calling January a win.
If there’s anything you’d like to see in future wrap up videos or posts, let me know in the comments. Thanks for being here, you rock!
Here’s that video I kept alluding to:
