My Year In Writing (2022 Wrapped)
The good, the bad, and the ugly from my last year of creative life.
My name is Jeanette, and I love all things self-reflective. MBTI (INFP, baby), astrology (Libra sun, Cancer rising, Saggitarius moon), the enneagram (4, like woah), tarot cards (I have a dangerous collection), human design (generator) and quizzes that tell me what Stranger Things character I am (Nancy Wheeler, obviously).
And, I’ll admit it, I am a giant sucker for Spotify Wrapped - I eagerly await my Top 100 Playlist all year long.
This year I thought it would be fun to do something similar, collecting and curating my own favorite 100 lines from my year of writing (I’m still working on that).
But as I went hunting for examples of my very best writing I kept getting sidetracked into reading all that I had written, and into contemplating the arc of my creative journey itself.
I found myself thinking about all the stories that poured out of me in 2022. About the life I was living behind the words that made it to the page. About why I wrote the things that I did. About why so many important stories remain unfinished. I thought about where the stories live in me and where I want to learn to be clearer, more honest, and more true.
I got self-reflective about my self-reflecting. How meta.
I tend (like most creatives) to focus on what remains unfinished or undone or not quite good enough, but through all this reflection I realized that I created and published a hell of a lot in 2022.
For whatever costs my resistance and lack of resourcing and giant fuckery of a neurodivergent brain levied this year—I gave birth to a damn decent number of words.
Before long, my analytical brain kicked in (did you know I have a science degree and used to be a clinical research coordinator? I know, it shocks me too) and I thought it might be fun to try to quantify some of what normally seems elusive and ethereal.
So I took a deep dive into the entirety of my creative and professional journey in 2022. The systems and tools and practices that allowed me to create the way I did. The word counts and breakdowns and the language that created the foundations of my work. The lessons learned and the goals I’m setting for myself in the year ahead.
It was a profoundly instructive (and entirely geekily pleasing) process.
This is a long and detailed post - so as always - if you have questions please feel free to comment or ask via the subscriber chat. I would love to have a deeper discussion and to assist you on your own creative path.
Workshop announcement:
As a part of pulling this together, I decided that in addition to my already planned Write Your Year Live Workshop on January 9th, I’d add a follow-up called Write Your Year: The System on January 16th.
This will be a 90-minute live session detailing the exact process, programs, and system I use to organize my writing, fuel my creativity, and set me up for creative success (recorded replay available if you cannot make the live class). This workshop is set up on a pay-what-you-can basis, with a suggested donation of just $47. I hope you’ll join me.
Without further adieu, my very own 2022 Writing Year Wrapped.
These numbers aren’t exact. There are probably some duplicates (or triplicates), and some pieces missing altogether. This also doesn’t reflect much of the private writing I’ve done, the love poems meant for only one set of eyes, the lines that flew out over text, the essays that will never be shared, the thousands of words not for public consumption but carefully considered and rendered nonetheless. This is an incomplete and imperfect picture, to be sure. And I’m damn proud of it just the same.
1. //dancing with the muse//
2022 Master Project
1, 477, 912 words
No. that is not a typo
Yes. There actually are 1, 477, 912 words in my 2022 master document.
No. I did not write all million plus words this year.
Let me explain.
For the past several years, I have used a program called Scrivener to hold all of my writing. Without overstatement, this single program has revolutionized my writing life. Instead of thousands of individual documents spread between multiple programs and devices, I now work on large-scale projects, one for each calendar year.
Since 2019 I have been steadily consolidating my system and refining how I work with Scrivener (more on that during the live workshop). Essentially, because I now have ultimate freedom to move and/or copy folders and documents between projects, my current project also includes all of my unfinished work from previous years, as well as all the pieces of my promotion/marketing/offerings engine, and even entire projects like my brand new upcoming book-in-progress.
When I say I cannot imagine writing without Scrivener, I mean it. From chaos to order, in the most beautiful way possible.
Finished & Published
91, 413 words
These are the words that made it out into the world. The ones that somehow made it through the twists and turns of my brain and onto the page and through the editing process. And then, finally landing in some measure of completion, that I deemed good enough to share. Here on substack and Instagram for the most part.
This year I did not pitch, submit for publication or make any sort of effort to broader my audience by publishing on platforms not my own. It was a full year, and one that asked a lot of me, and writing the words for myself was more than enough.
Unfinished Writing
75,115 words
This is my favorite folder. The place I land when it’s writing time, but I’m not sure what wants to be born.
I have a system of organization and color coding that helps me choose the pieces that are closer to completion, and keywords to determine the focus topic (I’ll share all the deets at the workshop) but mostly this folder is a dumping ground for everything from single lines (that once meant something but that remain a mystery now), to almost fully formed essays that I have either not had time to finish, or have not lived enough to write into completion.
I’ll take a deep dive into this folder soon, further classify and determine which of these will get carried over into the 2023 Master Project. And I know, after twenty years of writing my life, that the vast majority of these 75K words will likely never become anything more than the fragments and possibilities that they are right now. But still, it matters to me that I took the time to pull the thread of them down from the ethers and to record them to the extent that I could. Two decades of writing have taught me that I never know when life will deliver me the exact experience or lesson I was waiting to finish. And so each word is stored, important in its own right. Both for what it is and for what it may become.
Conversations To Write
51,271 words
When I say I mine my life for writing, I mean it. This folder is purely copied and pasted texts, WhatsApps, voice memos, and written notes from conversations I have had that offered me some spark of creation. I am surrounded by wise, beautiful, complex humans, and we have wise, beautiful, complex conversations. There is so much richness there, and I return here again to find words I have written without overthinking them or sparks of ideas that have more to offer. This folder is a deep well of ideas, and some of my most powerful lines come when I’m not trying to write anything official at all.
Collected Past Writing
268,185 words
I’ve written online for more than 20 years. For most of those years, I didn’t have a system at all. My writing is scattered around programs and computers and phones and old hard drives I can’t find the right connectors for. And so when I find a piece of older writing, I copy it here. And often, these pieces get revamped, added to, or shifted slightly to find new life. Not everything beautiful has to be brand new.
2. // published //
My main observation here. I don’t give myself enough credit.
I often have people comment about how consistent I am in sharing & how often I post. And I tend to see myself as inconsistent and sporadic because I am terribly, awfully, incredibly no good at sticking to a schedule or a plan.
I don’t publish Substack essays every Monday at 9 am, post to Instagram daily at the optimum time, or send a regular newsletter to my email list.
Even when I do, I’m often not very good at providing a distinct call to action or a clear path to the sale (the drive I have to create writing and build a system of offerings and products around that writing is often inversely proportional to my desire to take action to actually sell said writing, offerings, and products)
Truth: Getting more consistent at many of these things would greatly improve my writing career.
However, Those numbers show that, though I may not operate on a predictable timeline, I am showing up for this work at a pace that I should really be fucking proud of. And so I’m taking a little time to do just that.
It ain’t easy, this full-time independent working artist gig. It’s not easy at all. But I have chosen it and I protect it with a fierceness that sometimes surprises even me. I am blessed to make a living and build a life on the back of words that will spill from my mind and fingers whether or not I ever sell a damn thing. And so I keep going. And this helped me realize that I’m doing okay.
Except maybe on Tiktok. I can’t seem to find my groove over there. :)
3. // the nitty gritty //
Clearly, ya’ll. I started getting off on the numbers here. Some of these are wild guesses, clearly. Some are tongue-in-cheek. But some really matter.
I served 19 clients one-on-one this year. Some were book and writing clients - focused on poetry or memoir or fiction. Others are creative sovereignty clients, working to reclaim the right to create their own contract for their life and the living of it. Each one is beyond precious to me. This work lights me up and grounds me down, and I’m so grateful for each client who trusted me to create a container for their expansion. (if you’re interested in working with me one-on-one, you can book a free exploration call here)
31 blessed souls have supported my DIY crowdfunding campaign for my upcoming book - You Are Enough, which I will be working on with the goal of self-publishing in the fall of 2023. I could not create this book without the support of my village, and I am so entirely grateful for the vote of faith you all cast but supporting my creative process with this new baby.
I have 640 free Substack Subscribers, and 36 paid. Growing this section of my online presence has been slow and steady, but it feels really good over here. Substack, to me, feels like a return to the glory days of blogging, when the words mattered most. Where you could go to one place (remember Google Reader, yo?) and read through all your favorite writers and get lost in their words. It’s also the first space in a very long time that reminded me that my words hold value all on their own and that people will choose to financially support me, simply on the basis of my writing alone.
In December, through some stroke of a holiday miracle, my little publication was promoted on the Substack homepage, which resulted in an influx of amazing new free subscribers. As my plans for the year ahead involve spending much more time here, I am hoping to grow both my free and paid subscriber base to a level that more fully supports my work in the world. And I am so damn happy to have a space where my longer pieces can breathe and fly free.
If you’ve not yet subscribed, or you’re considering upgrading from free to paid.
This is the only place on the whole wide open internets where readers can directly support my work. Your paid subscription here is a huge part of what allows me to keep writing and growing my subscriber base in 2023 will give me the space to focus so much more of my attention on the deepest love of my life, writing.
4. // the words behind the work //
Truth? This was my favorite part of the data to compile.
Scrivener allows you to examine documents, folders, or the whole of a project to look at the words you are using repeatedly.
It’s entirely useful on an essay-by-essay basis to determine if I’m being redundant or repetitive with my word choices. But, as a look at the entire year of writing, it is a beautiful picture of how these words create the foundation of my work.
The words below represent what is important to me (note: chocolate and whiskey and sex made the list) but they also offer a clear reflection of who I am as a person, of the ideas that matter to me, of what I believe to be true of the world.
They also show where my energy was focused this year. I was slightly surprised that words like sovereign and boundaries and redemption were low on the list - as I think of these ideas as pillars in my body of work. But, on deeper reflection, that is not where my energy was focused this year, in my work or in my personal life.
And so no, it does not come as any surprise, to me or likely anyone else, that the most frequently used word was love.
I hope it always is.
5. // the tools //
It takes a lot to run a creative business. This is not a complete list of what it takes to run mine, but these are the essential pieces that I cannot work without.
Scrivener (see above and learn the nitty gritty during the workshop)
Apple Notes (where all my on-the-go writing and ideas originally lives, shared notes with clients, etc).
Substack (I am head over heels in love with Substack, and all they do for writers. end of story. Yes. You should start your own Substack. That is all).
Canva (graphics, videos)
Etsy (quote art prints, stickers, mugs, journals, etc)
Photoshop (graphics, mockups, design)
Zoom (online workshops, one on one coaching)
Instagram (the only truly active social. media presence I currently maintain)
Calendly (scheduling of client meetings and new client exploration calls)
Later (social media scheduling).
Infusionsoft (Email list, all e-commerce aside from Etsy, CRM)
WordPress (my poor outdated website, new site hopefully coming soon)
Stripe + Paypal (payment processing)
WhatsApp (I offer unlimited support via WhatsApp to all one-on-one and small group clients).
Stamps.com (finally saving me from standing in line at the post office to send out Etsy orders)
Large artist sketch pads (no lines, lie flat, for to-do lists, journaling, all the random ideas and creative visions)
Lamy fountain pens + ARTEZA Rollerball (I believe strongly in the power of a good, smooth-flowing pen to create better writing)
6. // 2022 lessons learned //
Whatever I'm resisting will stand in the way of the stories I most need to tell.
Healing is just a matter of returning to the cage to find a better way out (credit: Morgan Wade during this podcast interview we did together last year).
The stronger the system I have in place to contain my natural inclination toward chaos, the more art I can create (hint: check out the workshop)
Breaking my habit of allowing relational stress to pull me away from my creative calling is one hell of a job, but I'm here for it (and yes, this is one I need to write about).
Adderall makes a whole lot of life a whole lot more possible for my ADHD brain.
I still believe in love.
7. // 2023 Goals //
200 additional paid Substack Subscribers + 1500 new free subscribers.
Wanna become one of them?Publish bi-weekly essays on Substack. I have a plan to make my ‘This Is What I Know To Be True’ posts a regular feature, along with an additional deeper essay on the themes I’m exploring in the rest of life, with audio recordings and other bonuses (including a ‘Read Like A Writer’ Chat thread) for paid subscribers.
Land wholesale accounts for my book, prints & products + grow my Etsy shop to at least twice my current monthly income (I make lots of really pretty things, but I don’t do a whole lot of marketing for them, this needs to change + I want to see my work in stores, boutiques yoga studios and resorts/retreats, where people can pick up the prints and products and hold them and fall in love). Anyone with connections, please reach out.
Finally launch my new website (its been a several-year labor of love, cross your fingers for me).
Book #2 "You Are Enough" Self- Published Fall 2023. (I would be ever so grateful for your support with the funding campaign).
And the big one…
8. // the workshops //
If you’ve made it this far, and you’re intrigued by all of this information - I’d love to have you at my upcoming workshops.
On Monday, January 16th, I’ll be sharing my zoom screen with you as I set up my 2023 Master Scrivener Product from the ground up - including file structure, labels, keywords, and more, and showing you how I plug in the tools mentioned above to create a creativity engine that keeps me dancing with the muse all year long. We’ll follow up with an Ask Me Anything Q&A, and YES - the workshop will be recorded!
This is a pay-what-you-can workshop, with a suggested donation of $47.
This Monday, January 9th, we will be gathering for the second part of my Write Your Year Workshop - this time focused on creating a powerful intention and vision for your creative year ahead.
Finally, thank you - from the bottom of my heart, for being here. For believing in the work that I do in the world. For seeing me and holding my stories. This work is my purpose, my passion, my path in the world. I am so glad you are here.
xo.
Have questions about anything I’ve shared here? I am more than happy to answer via my subscriber chat or in the comments!
I (still) couldn’t love this more! (Realized I unintentionally deleted my original comment 🙃)
I love the seeing Wrapped stats every year. This is an amazing way to see the incredible work you've done in 2022. Can't wait to see where '23 takes you.