As 2012 draws to a close, it’s time for another retrospective blog post!

Personally, I don’t have too many complaints about 2012. I accomplished some of my goals for the year, fell short in others, and learned a whole bunch. Work at the day job was interesting and challenging, yet I still managed to carve out time for my after-hours hobbies. I finally released my first Mac app, released a heap of updates for my iOS apps, learned even more about Bonsai than I’d hoped, and came to terms with some truths about my writing. I’m disappointed I didn’t accomplish some of my goals, but that just gives me something to strive for next year.

For many years I’ve drifted in and out of fiction writing, since my first efforts in 2003 where I changed from a mindset of writing for my own enjoyment to writing for publication. Over the past 4 years my efforts have dwindled to the point where I’m really just keeping stories in circulation, and not actively writing much new material. I spend most of my spare time working on apps these days, leaving little time for fiction writing.

Last year I took part in my first NaNoWriMo and learned a lot about the craft of novel-writing, despite not reaching the 50,000 word goal. What I ended up with was two-thirds of a novel and a decent outline for the rest. It was the longest single piece of fiction I’d ever written, and I was understandably chuffed and looking forward to finishing it in 2012. Due to apps eating my spare time, I never got around to it. As November approached, I again decided to participate in NaNoWriMo, and in keeping with the spirit of the thing, I planned to work on my 2nd novel. Unfortunately I didn’t get started until a few days into November, and progress was painfully slow. It took a further week before ideas started to gel, but by then I’d begun to get discouraged and felt little motivation to plow ahead for the rest of the month. It didn’t help that I still had some urgent app updates to work on, along with a strong desire to get started on a new Mac app.

So writing-wise, 2012 was a huge disappointment. That said, a few days before Christmas I received a nice email: an acceptance from an editor of a cool online fiction market for a short story I’d collaborated on with Samantha Henderson. We were both pleased our little tale found the perfect home. I look forward to announcing the story and venue closer to actual publication.

I’d planned to do a lot more reading this year, but this didn’t work out too well, as you can see from the extremely short list below:

Horns by Joe Hill
Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

All were fantastic reads, so I’m pleased that what little reading time I had was well-spent.

I made good use of my daily commutes. I found myself drifting away from the comics podcasts I’d typically listen to, instead switching to a regular dose of short fiction through a wonderful trio of podcasts: Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and PodCastle. It was like revisiting an old friend after a long absence, finding them to be just as delightful as you’d remembered. If you’re an avid genre fiction reader with time for podcasts, I recommend these three wholeheartedly. Not only do they showcase some excellent work, but they’re also free, operating on a donation model. Throw a few bucks their way, if you can. You’ll be helping to fund some of the best short fiction produced today.

No retrospective would be complete without some stats:

2012 Stats:

My app plans for 2012 were fairly aggressive. I planned to release my first Mac app, Story Tracker for Mac, along with releasing a bunch of updates to my three existing iOS apps: Story Tracker, Artwork Tracker, and Bonsai Album. For the latter, I planned to localize the app into several languages.

The Mac app took longer than expected, but I finally released it for direct-sale and via the Mac App Store in September. You can read all about the trials and tribulations of Mac app development here and here. It’s already received some good reviews from AppStorm and AppModo. Having gained a good feel for Mac development, in mid-July I announced a Mac version of Bonsai Album. That’s coming along nicely. I’ve posted an early screenshot, and I’m on track to release the app in spring 2013.

From May through October, I localized Bonsai Album into six languages, including Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Portuguese. While it wasn’t a trivial exercise, the process was made much easier by using the app localization services of iCanLocalize and managing the translated strings using the superb Linguan app. Feedback from customers was fantastic, which was one of the key reasons behind my decision to bring the app to the Mac. If you’re curious about what localization can do for your app, consider this: over 60% of the sales of Bonsai Album come from outside the US, and over 40% are from non English-speaking countries. The app market is global, and your customers definitely appreciate localization efforts.

In addition to putting a lot of effort into the user interface on Story Tracker for Mac, I tried to improve my icon design skills. I found the Icon Resource videos to be quite useful, and spent many hours translating what I’d learned into designing icons in Inkscape. While it’s by no means perfect, I’m pleased with how the icon for Story Tracker for Mac turned out. I’ve come a long way from my first effort on the iOS version of Story Tracker! I took what I’d learned from the Mac icon and gave the iOS version a much needed update, too.

This year I attended a handful of monthly meetings of the Midwest Bonsai Society, along with the shows they run at the Chicago Botanic Garden. This year I visited 3 Bonsai shows, two of which were at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and one at Morton Arboretum. I attended more workshops than in years past (Satsuki Azalea, Kingsville Boxwood, Bring-Your-Own-Tree, and Ponderosa Pine) and added a new tree to my growing collection (a Brazilian Raintree). I especially enjoyed Andy Smith’s Ponderosa Pine workshop – he really has an eye for great material and knows how to bring out the best in any tree of this species. For the Bring-Your-Own-Tree workshop with visiting master, Peter Warren, I brought along my Bald Cypress, and got some great hands-on tips and styling advice. Peter Warren’s exhibit critique of the August show was interesting and informative, which you can see here. While looking for bonsai pots online, I came across Iker Bonsai Pottery and found some great hand-crafted work. I ordered a nice pot for my new Boxwood there. This is one of those aspects of the hobby I haven’t paid much attention to until now. It’s like a whole other hobby in itself!

Things were pretty quiet travel-wise this year. We made some short road trips to Michigan and spent some time in Milwaukee and Door County in Wisconsin. Closer to home, we stayed at the incredible Ravenstone Castle B&B in Harvard, Illinois.

As usual, my personal fitness varied throughout 2012. I was off to a strong start, keeping a regular routine until May or June when I began putting even more time into the apps. I returned to my regular workouts in late November and again learned why it’s always better to avoid long gaps between workouts.

Though I always seem to have trouble meeting my personal goals for the New Year, I just can’t help myself from coming up with more. So here I go for 2013…

I got a bit out of shape later in the year, so I want to try to avoid that in future. I intend to maintain my workouts in 2013, but most definitely do not plan to participate in any marathons or other extreme contests of strength or endurance!

For apps, it goes without saying I’ll need to work on updates for my existing apps. In particular, I have some cool stuff in mind for Story Tracker and Bonsai Album. Bonsai Album for Mac will be my first priority, though. I’d also like to come up with something new. The financial return from my huge time investment in apps is still very modest indeed, and it’d be great to come up with some app ideas that really take off.

I enjoy working on the app stuff, but would like to dedicate more time to writing in 2013. I also need to read more than a paltry handful of books! At this stage I can’t see myself participating in NaNoWriMo next year, since I have more than enough on my plate with two novels to finish. I also plan to write some new short stories and get some of my inventory out into circulation again. It’s going to be a tough juggling act, for sure.

Best wishes for 2013, and I hope you have a happy and productive New Year!

Tags: apps, Bonsai, goals, New Year, writing

During the first few minutes of 2012, it’s time to cast one final glance back at 2011 for my traditional year-end retrospective.

Overall I’d say 2011 was a good year. While there was still some overtime at the day job, it didn’t seem to be quite as insanely busy as 2010, and I was able to devote a fair amount of time to after-hours pursuits. I released a new iOS app and tonnes of updates for all of my apps, attended more Bonsai meetings and workshops, visited Disney World, and wrote two-thirds of a novel. Not bad at all.

Since 2008 my fiction writing has essentially been non-existent, with only minimal effort devoted to submitting stories to various markets and keeping them in circulation. Even this died down to nothing in 2011. The bulk of my spare time was devoted almost entirely to app development and marketing. Writing and maintaining apps, dealing with customer support, and somehow trying to get the word out in a crowded marketplace all takes a huge amount of effort. I think this is something many writers would agree applies equally to writing, especially now that many are finding their way in the eBook market and exploring self-publishing. By October it was looking like yet another year would pass without any new activity on the writing front. And then in the final week of October, I got caught up in the excitement of various blog and Twitter posts talking about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, for short). In years past I’d toyed with the idea of participating, but quite frankly the idea scared the hell out of me, and it was always easy to dismiss it and use excuses like the massive time commitment required, or not having a novel-sized idea in mind. In that final week of October, the idea that I should finally throw my hat into the ring and participate became steadily more insistent. So without having a clue about what to write, in a brief blog post I announced my insane plan to try to write a novel in a month. As the last of the trick-or-treaters left our front porch on Halloween night, I threw together some rough ideas that would soon snowball into a novel. While I didn’t meet the 50,000 word quota, I wrote consistently throughout November and learned a tremendous amount about what it takes to write a novel. By the end of the month the novel-in-progress had become the longest single piece of fiction I’d ever written. The momentum came to an abrupt halt in early December when I felt burnt-out and decided to relax and spend more time with family. That, and some quality time with the Portal, Portal 2, and Left 4 Dead games 😉 After all, I’d spent most of my evenings and weekends in November hunched in front of the computer working on my novel…

If there’s one thing I regret, it’s that I wasn’t able to read more fiction. Even my comic reading took a back seat to the writing and app work. Here’s my paltry list of reads for 2011:

Drawing out the Dragons
Elephantmen, HC Vol 1 – Wounded Animals
Invincible Ultimate Collection, HC Vol 3
How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months
No Plot? No Problem!

Audio books used to be how I kept myself amused during workouts and the daily commute, but this year I continued listening mostly to music or podcasts. Among my favourites were the Comic Geek Speak podcast, and the Comic Book page podcasts (The Mayo Report and Spotlight episodes).

Here are some of the various statistics I’ve been keeping track of each year:

2011 Stats:

When 2011 arrived, my app plans for the year were fairly hazy. I knew I’d be updating my two existing iOS apps, Artwork Tracker, and Story Tracker, incorporating feedback from customers and generally adding more polish. I knew the Mac App Store was to be announced early in the new year, but I wasn’t yet committed to developing for the new platform. That soon changed when I had a chance to play around with it and download some apps for myself. The ease of use was astonishing, and it didn’t take long for me to realize this would be a fun and viable new platform for app development. I posted some thoughts, including the announcement of Story Tracker for Mac. So began several months of study and initial development on the new app. Unfortunately this proved to be more complicated than I thought, and several new developments conspired to make life difficult: iOS5, iCloud, and OS X Lion. With iOS5, I would have to re-test and update my iOS apps, and the impending arrival of Lion and iCloud would mean I’d need to either upgrade my slow, aging Mac to Lion (and not be able to test on OS X Snow Leopard, the other Mac App Store platform), or buy a new Mac. Finances being what they were, the latter was not an option in mid-2011. Meanwhile, I’d had an intriguing idea for a new iOS app. I’d been looking for an app to keep track of my Bonsai collection and various related activities, but there were slim pickings on the App Store. As soon as I’d wrapped up some updates to my existing apps, I wrote up some requirements for a new app called Bonsai Album and wrote a quick blog post about it. I put everything else on the back burner and spent the next three months working on Bonsai Album. On October 6th, it landed on the App Store. Initial feedback from the Beta testers was promising, and since then I’ve been very pleased with how well it has been received. Bonsai Album has been reviewed by App Advice, and even got a mention in the Midwest Bonsai Society newsletter (my club!), among others. While the app has had only modest success so far, it’s doing far better in its first few months on the App Store than either of my other two apps did. While I’m still yet to recoup my overall development costs for all three apps, 2011 is the first year in which I’ve made a small profit.

I continued to attend the monthly meetings of the Midwest Bonsai Society in 2011, along with the shows they run at the Chicago Botanic Garden. This year I again visited 4 Bonsai shows, three of which were at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and one at Morton Arboretum. I also attended 2 workshops (Satsuki Azalea, and Pomegranate) and added a new tree to my growing collection (a Bald Cypress). I’ve learned a little more about the art of Bonsai this year, unfortunately mostly related to the impact of pests and long-delayed repotting. Like most things, I anticipate this hobby will involve a lifetime of learning.

We didn’t plan much travel this year. We’d intended to just make some short road trips to Michigan and Wisconsin, but that was about it. What actually ended up happening was a totally unexpected trip to Disney World in Florida with my wife’s parents. We decided to make a big trip of it and spent a few days at each of the parks: The Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and the Animal Kingdom. We also made some side-trips to visit SeaWorld and Cape Canaveral, including catching up with some Florida-based relatives. We had an absolute blast, and our trip was definitely the big highlight of the year. For Thanksgiving this year we spent some quality time in Green Lake, Wisconsin.

One of my goals for 2011 was to get back into a regular workout habit. I managed to keep at it for about half the year, until hurling myself back into app development and writing the novel. I returned to it in December and promptly realized exactly how out of shape I’d become. Ouch!

Sadly, I wasn’t able to make much of a dent in our massive photo backlog this year. I’m still over a year behind! I think it has helped having to at least keep ahead of my wife’s scrapbooking. When she needs the photos, I make the effort to get them organized in time.

As is usual in the waning hours of the year, I like to come up with goals and hatch devious plans for the New Year. So what’s cooking for 2012? I’m glad you asked 😉

I’d like to at least reach my previous level of fitness and build on that for 2012. I’m probably not going to bench press 170 lbs again anytime soon or start running marathons, but regular workouts and a decent level of fitness are definitely achievable. The pain of having to start all over again from square one should be sufficient motivation!

For apps, I’d like to put out more updates for my existing iOS apps, possibly including those much-requested language localizations for Bonsai Album. If the app continues to do well, that’s definitely on the cards. The big one, of course, is to finally launch Story Tracker for Mac. I know a lot of people have been waiting patiently for this one, and I hope they won’t have to wait too much longer. I finally bought that new Mac Mini, and I’ve spent the last few hours getting it all setup for app development. After I get Story Tracker for Mac out the door and have a few updates under my belt, then I’ll think about what comes next.

In 2012 I’d really like to get back into writing in a big way. Starting a new novel in 2011 was a good start, but now that I know what it takes, I’d like to build on that and finally break the writing drought of recent years. Task one will be to complete my novel, Plague Magic. You can track my progress on the sidebar on this blog. Task two is to get back into writing short stories and start submitting again. I may do some dabbling in self-publishing. I also plan to ramp up my fiction reading, not only for enjoyment, but also in support of my writing efforts. You can’t be a writer without being a reader, right? And though it’ll be a stretch, I plan to write at least one more novel in 2012.

While I intend to update the blog periodically, I spend most of my social networking time on Twitter these days. I mostly follow other iOS developers, writers, and Bonsai fiends. You can look me up at @andrewnicolle.

I wish everyone the best for 2012, and hope you have a happy and productive New Year!

Tags: apps, Bonsai, goals, New Year, writing