Welcome to my Annual Review! My year is not complete with giving myself a performance review, examining what went right, what went wrong, how well I lived up to my themes and goals. These reviews have morphed for me, something to do with the pandemic, no doubt, into a more general positive or negative view, examining my level of satisfaction with my performance instead of the nitty gritty quantifiable details that I used to focus on. I’m mellowing in my middle-age, and what used to be important is no longer as vital. It’s interesting to realize and watch this transition through the years. Also, I’ve altered both my approach to new work and my definition of success, and that, too, changes this rumination.

So with those caveats as a guide, let’s do this.

Looking Back on 2022, The Year of Choice

I had two overarching goals that I publicly claimed for 2022.

• I want to write more.

• I want to spend less time on things that take me away from that goal.

So how did I do?

Actually, not too bad. I stayed home, skipped all the conferences, and spent the year filling the pipeline. I typed The End on 9 projects that were in various stages of completion. I started 2 that will be wrapped in 2023. I planned 17 more possible projects, across three pen names. Trust me, I certainly won’t write all of these. I just spent an afternoon dumping all my cogent and half-baked ideas into a single file, and that’s the number that emerged. As for the third pen name—I have some stories that don’t fit with my hard-hitting thrillers or my urban fantasy, (romance, speculative fiction) so they slot into a special place. I seriously doubt they will ever happen, but I need to acknowledge them.

This creative mind dump is such a good exercise, and I encourage all creatives to do it at least once a year. The goal is simple:  get every idea in play into a single place. It’s similar to my outlining method, really—plopping every thought, scene, piece of dialogue, and character description into a document before I start a book. Offloading helps me think more clearly.

But I closed the year feeling dissatisfied with my performance. I focused, yes, and got a lot written, a lot finished. But I made several decisions that bit me in the butt and learned a couple of very hard lessons, which makes looking back on this year more frustrating than I’d like. Both personally and creatively, my value structure has changed, and my work needs to reflect that. This is something I’m very excited to explore in 2023 and beyond.

Now, here’s something funny for you. Drafting this review, I was surprised to see my annual word spreadsheet was a bit anemic. As much as I wrote, as much as I finished, the word count was among my lowest in years.

Guess what? I was missing an entire project. A *big* project. So my crappy word count suddenly leaped by over 30,000, I was a little happier with my year-end results. I started to dig deeper and realized my book count was off, too. I’d read twice as many books as I recorded.

Feeling a bit better, I updated my spreadsheets and then had to give this all a lot more thought. First, I’ve put less value on tracking this year, which on the whole, I think is healthy. But no matter what I do, my satisfaction with my work is tied to output. I didn’t hit my goal, but I didn’t fall as short as I thought I did. There was an unreasonable amount of relief in this realization, so clearly I have more work to do on myself to stop attaching so much importance to the data. Speaking of…

NITTY GRITTY: AKA NERDOLOGY

2022 Total Words: 295,896
Fiction Total: 178,300
Non-Fiction Total: 117,596*
Fiction Percentage: 65%
Books Read: 81
Creative Projects as J.T. Ellison: 7
Creative Projects as Joss Walker: 5

*(Excludes Email and Trello, which total 210,000)

Major Projects Worked On:

JT Novels:

IT’S ONE OF US (2023 Standalone)
THE WOLVES COME AT NIGHT (Taylor Jackson #9)
#LEGACY (2024 Standalone)

JT Short Stories:

These Cold Strangers
X House
Louche 49

Joss Walker Novels:

MASTER OF SHADOWS (Jayne #2)
THE KEEPER OF FLAMES (Jayne #3)
DISCOVERY OF MAGIC (Jayne Bundle)

Joss Walker Short Stories:

A Betrayal of Magic
Guardians of Silence

Some other cool things:

• A WORD ON WORDS was renewed for Season 8, and Season 7 was nominated for an EMMY

• TOMB OF THE QUEEN won the Silver Falchion for Best Fantasy at Killer Nashville

• IT’S ONE OF US got a starred Library Journal and some astounding blurbs

• Appeared on Cal Newport’s podcast, and interviewed some astounding authors myself

Some not cool things:

• Jameson’s illness continues

• We got COVID—twice!

• I have some long-term heart issues post-vaccine and COVID

• No genuine time off after April, and no social media sabbaticals

But all in all, 2022 was a decent year. Frustrating on many levels, but we’re healthy again, safe, sheltered, and loved, which is really all that matters in the end. R.L. and I are having an awful lot of fun with the Jayne books and stories, I’m totally locked in on the psychological standalones, I’m very pleased with IT’S ONE OF US, and my creative spirit is feeling satisfied, and ready for the next steps.

The Year Ahead: 2023, The Year of Ritual

With perpetual changes to my publishing schedule, changes in the industry, the pandemic shifts, and changes to my personal ethos, I’ve lost many of my daily, monthly, and annual rituals over the past few years. This year, I intend to reclaim the valuable rituals that helped me build my career and kept me laser-focused over the past decade. This includes daily goals, project-specific deadlines, and a reinvigorated creative flow. I have plans, people. So many plans. I also have a new bellwether: will it matter in five years? If the answer is no, I ain’t doing it. There is great freedom in this question. You should ask yourself the same.

The “first word you see” tests abound this time of year, and the one I took on New Year’s Day gave me these three words:

Transformation
Abundance
Confidence

These are exactly the values I want to focus on in 2023. I’d decided on Ritual as my annual word in early December, when we’d canceled our annual holiday party. I just didn’t have the energy to host a shindig of that proportion. But as we got closer to the holidays, I realized that having something important to us to look forward to has to take precedence. This party is our annual ritual, and we had to respect that. (It was epic, by the way.)

That got me thinking about all the things we’ve given up these past few years, the ways our day-to-day and month-to-month lives have altered, shifted, changed, and not always for the better. Boom, Ritual was born.

But ritual is more than daily habits and parties and social media sabbaticals. It’s about travel, togetherness, unplugging completely, and respecting breaks. It is about reclaiming my time, reclaiming my space, reclaiming my creativity, and doing what’s right for me and my little family. It’s about saying “No, thank you” often and with great joy and zero guilt. It is about the transformation that comes from expectation, the abundance that comes from daily work, and the confidence that comes with being older and wiser, knowing that rituals are vital to a happy, healthy life.

I have a lot I want to accomplish in 2023. My top line goals: read 80 books, write 200,000 words, publish a bunch of great stories, tape another season of A Word on Words, stay focused on what matters, and get back on my bike. All while staying healthy, getting plenty of rest and exercise and sunshine and time off, and taking care of my people. All achievable, I think.

In the first quarter, I’m planning to finish drafting the new standalone, taking the Jayne series wide (meaning the books and stories will be available wherever you buy books instead of just at Amazon), editing Jayne #3, plotting Jayne #4 and some stories with R.L, and gearing up for the release of IT’S ONE OF US. I will be on tour for IOOU, too, so be on the lookout for the dates in my newsletter and on the website.

The second quarter will be quieter, with a family trip to the homeland and quick trip to NYC for Thrillerfest. And more writing, naturally. There may be a secret project or two that crop up around this time, and of course, we’ll need to talk about Taylor!

Quarters 3 and 4 are quieter still, with nothing but writing and editing planned, plus a business trip with the hubby. I’ve front loaded the year on purpose, because I absolutely loved how not having engagements in 2022 gave me so much freedom to create. Here’s to more of that!

This is all wonderful for me. But what about you? You, my friends, are about to be bombarded with the abundance of last year’s theme: Choice! I chose to stay home and write, and now you get those stories. Looking at my release schedule, where 2022 was a desert, 2023 is a lush frangipani-laden garden of delights. Here is what I currently have on the schedule:

J.T.

• These Cold Strangers - Amazon Originals: We Could Be Heroes Collection (February 7, 2023)

• HER DARK LIES mass market paperback (February 21, 2023)

• IT'S ONE OF US hardcover (February 21, 2023)

• THE WOLVES COME AT NIGHT (Taylor Jackson #9) (Spring)

• Louche 49 - Infinity: A Suspense Magazine Anthology (March 21, 2023)

• X House - In These Hallowed Halls: A Dark Academia Anthology (September 12, 2023)

Joss

• Guardians of Fury (Guardians Volume 2) (May 23, 2023)

• THE KEEPER OF FLAMES (Jayne #3) (June 27, 2023)

• THE PROPHESY OF WIND (Jayne #4) (October 24, 2023)

Think that might hold you for a while???

Yep. 2023 is gonna be a big year! Here’s wishing the best for us all. 🤠

For the past several years, I’ve been doing annual reviews of my life and work, based on the format from Chris Guillebeau’s wonderful Annual Review on his blog, The Art of Non-Conformity. Chris’s system is exceptionally detailed, more so than I really need, but the gist is there. It’s a great system for those of us who are self-employed and want to do an assessment of our work for the year. Here’s the link to the actual post. Go on over there and take a read. I’ll wait. 

And if you're interested, here are the links to my previous annual reviews for 2009 (Too Damn Much), 2010 (Evolution), 2011 (Depth), 2012 (Simplicity), 2013 (Pencil), 2014 (Making Do), 2015 (No), 2016, (Lent), 2017 (Flow), 2018 (Joy), 2019 (Enough), 2020 (Content) and 2021 (Choice).