As 2025 winds down, now seems like an appropriate time to look back on the year, consider what I’ve accomplished, and think about what accountability means to me for the coming year.

For me, one of the things about writing (not only about writing but definitely about writing) is that there is no obvious measure of accomplishment. Each acceptance, each publication is both incredibly satisfying and painfully fleeting. On to the next.

I have counted words and hours, submissions and rejections. I have collected all sorts of data and it all works and is motivating until it is not. (I actually clicked away from writing for a moment there to go explore what kind of cool writing data visualization thing I could insert here, but I will instead finish writing this and think about that later. Progress!)

A version of my bio that I frequently use half-jokingly says I spend too much time on social media (it used to say Twitter and once bitten, twice shy, we’re going to stick with the vague over the specific now) and not enough on my website. But there is no amount of time spent on the website, on my writing, on editing or submitting or any of it that would ever quite be enough.

It’s easy to compare against others who are so much more productive but, unless that (somehow — certainly not for me) inspires you to the same heights, well. Maybe don’t focus on that so much.

Another joke-but-not-a-joke I’ve often repeated is that I’d like an app for writing that functions like the one I use for marathon training. I punch in my targets (race date – fingers crossed pace – # of days per week I want to run – previous results – I do really love data) and it spits out a tidy plan. Each day’s just a matter of opening the app and tapping on the workout that the app has decided is appropriate. A relaxed 6km. A tempo run. An 18km long run. Intervals. A 32km long run (oh my god not that one). All laid out and in the end there’s a race and I’m done and someone puts a medal around my neck and I’m sore and exhausted (and so hungry). But my god is there a sense of accomplishment (even if that hoped-for pace doesn’t quite materialize).

But you can’t input inspiration and creative impulse into an app. You can’t know when the ideas are going to coalesce, when two disparate thoughts are going to bump into each other. Or at least I can’t.

(Given the opportunity, I would quote Douglas Adams at people incessantly, but this makes me think of:

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with
<several paragraphs of Arthur’s morning routines follow>
God, what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck out his tongue. “Yellow,” he thought. The word yellow wandered through this mind in search of something to connect with.
Fifteen second later he was out of his house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979))

I don’t know when I’m going to be lying down in front of that bulldozer, so building an app to try to determine that is off the table.

I’ve tried more mundane ways to be accountable and they all worked very well, again, until they didn’t. But they all do help and I am nothing if not a creature of habit—I just need to start and then I will hang onto that routine for an absurdly long period of time. (No, really, absurdly long, but just about any disruption to it and then .)

This is all a very long-winded way of saying that I have a new plan for the coming year (because of course I do), but it’s starting now with the end of November because if I put it off I’ll honestly probably forget about it (I wish I were joking about that).

I do think it’s funny I can commit to random goals and then my brain just goes along with it, but here we are. I’m going to do a monthly summary of what I’ve accomplished writing (and writing-adjacently). I want to keep it narrow and focused, no discussing what I’ve read or listened to or watched (if I want to share about those things, I’m going to do it in a separate post). Too much material to cover makes it overwhelming and results in really brief, shallow takes.

I want to be focused.

• What have I written.
• What’s been submitted.
• Anything published?
• What are my immediate plans?

(It is not lost on me that my ~800 word first draft of this piece was written as a way to procrastinate and not work on my short fiction to-do list.)

I’ll post my November summary in the next couple days.