A 2012 Writing Tally

At the beginning of the year I set a goal to write or revise at least three pages of academic writing each week this year. To that end, I set up a page to keep track of my writing and revising total here on the blog, and, while most weeks it wasn't a problem to get to that total as I had a number of projects that I was working on, I can definitely say that there were four or five weeks during the year that I wouldn't have met the goal if not for that page. As a result, I managed to meet that minimum even during the weeks that I had job interviews, was grading mountains of midterms, was in New York to work on a database project with other historians, and moving across the country.

My campus office: the scene of much of my writing this fall

Alas, I can't claim to have done as good a job in terms of how I had intended to focus those writing energies, though. When I set my goals for 2012, I wanted to focus my writing on getting two articles submitted to journals, getting a book contract and working toward finishing my book manuscript, and apply for more grants to do my research. I did apply for some grants, but one competition was canceled due to the financial crisis in Spain and I became ineligible for others that I applied for when I accepted my current position. I submitted two journal articles and one of them has been accepted for publication. I did work on my book proposal and a few revisions here and there, but over the summer I decided to wait until I was at my new institution before sending out the proposal to academic presses. Unfortunately, then I was unable to unpack for a while due to the furniture situation, and by the time that I could I was busy with teaching, grading, and other writing tasks, and I have been sitting on it ever since.

Things have not always quite gone according to plan, and I've tried to be willing to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. For example, I wrote a conference paper in the fall, and a journal editor heard my presentation and asked me to expand the piece and submit it within a few weeks. I chose to do that even though it meant delaying some work on the volume I'm co-editing and on another article manuscript, which I had intended to submit by the end of the year. Because of the timing of the academic year, I won't be able to get back to that piece until the new year and probably won't have it ready for submission until March. I have also spent plenty of hours working on the co-edited volume. I wrote some other things as well - - research notes, a public lecture, and a few research presentations, not too mention countless pages of things I didn't count in my tally like syllabi, course proposals, and lecture notes for my classes.

So while it hasn't been the perfect year in terms of academic productivity, I'm putting this one in the books as a win. Academics and writers, do you keep track of the number of pages that you write or set regular word count goals? Did you have a writing-related goal this year? How did you do?