Failing to Keep Up with the Joneses

We're closing in on the last quarter of the year, and I feel like I'm slipping farther and farther. The list of tasks to get done in 2016 has quite a few things crossed off as of today, but I still have over half the list left to go.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

My old anal self would be despairing at this point for not being three quarters of the way through the to-do list by now.

But my new self? Well, she listed everything that's come out, or is about to come out, this year to an old friend over dinner last Friday. The friend, who is not a writer but is an attorney looking to change careers, was impressed because to her, writing is tedious and time-consuming.

And I realized my old self had been doing something stupid. I'd fallen into the same trap I'd warned other writers about--comparing myself to other people. Failing to keep up with other writers didn't necessarily mean I had failed.

Already, I've written more this year than I had last year or the year before. I'd definitely published more this year than I had last year or the year before. Maybe I wasn't as caught up with my business plan as I would have liked, but I wasn't sitting on my hands either.

This last week alone, I uploaded the print version of Justice: The Beginning, reviewed my portion of the galleys for Sword and Sorceress 31, organized my blurb sheets for each published story (which was a way overdue task), edited a bit more of Zombie Goddess, and wrote a bit on four different novels.

So I'm failing forward.

And that's always a good thing.