Before I get to my belated goals for 2024 (hey, I still have almost eleven months left!), I need to review my 2023 goals and how I did with them.

As I mentioned in some former posts, I broke my ankle back in August. I was incapacitated for the next six weeks or so, which should have been good writing time but wasn’t. I’ve found that the brain doesn’t really want to work when the body is busy healing itself.

So I didn’t achieve my 2023 goals completely, but I made  good progress.

On the novel front, I’ve finished the first draft of Treadwell House and made one serious editing pass. I plan to start considering what I’m going to do with it shortly. I’d hoped to finish a second novel, but given the delay, I only just started on the second book, which will be the fourth in the Market Center Mysteries series, tentatively titled Unleashed for Murder. I wrote 8,000 words before I had to hang it up for the holidays. It’s now at close to 15,000 words, on its way to being around 75,000.

I did meet my goal of 5 short stories written, though only one of them saw publication last year. My story, “The Other Wedding Crasher” is part of the Malice, Matrimony & Murder anthology, which released last November. Order links here:  https://books2read.com/malicebook I did submit a couple of other stories, but have not gotten responses on those as yet.

Due to changes in the audiobooks market, I haven’t been able to do an audio version of A Vampire’s Christmas Carol as I’d hoped. But I did get an older Christmas short story out at the end of November. The Ghosts of Christmas Present was part of an anthology of Christmas romances a couple of years ago. I’m giving it a new launch as a stand-alone. Order links here: https://kmccullough.com/books/short-stories/the-ghosts-of-christmas-present/

Otherwise, I’ve done better with the blogging, though again I had a couple of long breaks this summer. My personal autobiography and family history project are in progress, but not finished.