December 21, 2018

December 2018 Writer’s Life: Burnout month & yearly totals [#yearofwriting]

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Well… Here I am. It’s the end of the year and I need to tell you about how my writing goals and financial goals went for 2018. But first, I want to address something else: I have been feeling a lot of burnout this month. I am not exactly sure where it came from but, needless to say, it has caused a lot of grief in my life this month. Actually, I suspect that this has been coming for a few months but I didn’t realize it until this month… when I basically could barely function.

To be honest, I think I maybe worked half of the usual time that I could? It’s been awful. I don’t know what all has been going on with me but I am taking a break for the holidays and hope that 2019 will be better. In the meantime, I quit my Simplemost/The Delite gig because I was hoping that it would help with the burnout but it didn’t, really. Here’s hoping that a real holiday break (two weeks!) will help instead. And now, for my monthly and yearly totals!

How much I made: $2620

As you can see, I definitely did not make my goal this month. All throughout 2018, my goal was to make $5k a month and I failed most of those months… During my Q3 totals, I determined that I still needed to make $21,835 in order to make my year-end goal. That meant that I needed my monthly totals to be $7,278 for October, November AND December. I didn’t make even close to that in November and December, though I did have my highest month in October (still coming short of that total, though).

So, here’s my breakdown: In total, I made $49,927 during 2018. That’s not actually bad, of course, but definitely fell short of my $60,000 goal for 2018 and, even worse, I fell short of my 2017 total (which was $55,960). That’s obviously VERY disappointing news… especially since I had a lot of stuff happen this year which meant that I actually needed to make more money, not less, in order to keep up. The biggest, of course, was that we bought a house!

But then again, it is what it is. I’ve been talking to my therapist more this month since, ya know, burnout, and she made this really excellent point: I had major surgery earlier this year, I bought a house and moved, and I was also going through my first year of marriage… and just ONE of those things is a lot for anyone. And I had all three! Therefore, I need to give myself a break. I didn’t work as much as I wanted to this year but I was dealing with a LOT of big stuff. So, honestly, if I was able to make almost $50k while working probably an average of 25 hours a week during the year… Then I am doing okay. I hope to have some big plans for 2019 that will take that number higher than ever before. But in the meantime, I am taking a much-needed and much-deserved break to enjoy my family, friends and a wonderful husband (and our first wedding anniversary!) before the new year comes.

What was published (by The Temper):