So – last week was a total waste of time. I blame the mutant flu for this lost productivity.
Back to healthy, also worked on some noncreative but really important projects. Ready to get back to normal right about now.
Administrative Stuff
Information and update about this blog
Yearly Goals Checklist
Well, the year is 25% finished, so let’s see how poorly I’m doing at keeping my resolutions:
1-Read twenty books.
What I’ve read so far:
Altered Carbon, The Crown Conspiracy, The Prince, Sworn to the Night
Currently reading: The Art of War
So behind by a few pages. Good enough.
2-Fifty-two blog posts.
I haven’t counted them, but I must be behind. On the other hand, if I stick to my current two-posts a week schedule, I’ll catch up quickly.
3-Get Book the First out of my head.
Editing is progressing steadily. I’d say I’m on track or even ahead of schedule here, and I’m certainly approaching the “One Final Push” stage. I’ll probably take a breather from editing in a week or two to build a list of final-attempts-at-queries, and I’ll probably manage to send those out by the end of June.
4-Work on the actual, not abandonned Book the Second.
I’ve finally found the energy to return to steady writing. The wordcount is at about 6500, meaning we’re at about 10% of the first draft. Below where I should be, but positive trend so let’s take it.
5-Make progress on improving this site.
Progress has been done, so that’s a technical win. Realistically, I still need to work on a lot of things, but that’s not plausible for now. I’ll keep going with the small improvements but don’t expect anything visible.
So there we have it. Not too shabby considering the long hiatus I took. Let’s keep those trends going!
Extended Hiatus
Well, after committing to my resolutions, why not start by not posting for more than a month? Heck, why not drop every creative project for a while?
But I have a good reason – a cool, cool project (on the personal side) that might end up letting me be much more productive later on. Unfortunately, that took a lot of my time.
That said, going forward I should be able to post a bit more frequently. And I should be able to progress on the writing front as well.
But the easiest way to get back on track after screwing up a schedule is to limit the scope of activities, and to cull out the high-work, low-result activities. In my case, this means abandonning the Europa Universalis Let’s Play for now. It’s fun, but it”s a fantastic excuse to just play Europa Universalis, and the writing I get out of it is dry an uninteresting. I might come back to it someday, but I’ll definitely be going for a less marathonian achievement than the world conquest.
So that’s where things stand at the moment. Hopefully productivity will improve soon.
2018 Resolutions
As may be apparent, I’m currently not as gung-ho about this whole becoming-a-writer thing as last year.
Doesn’t mean I’m quitting, just that I’ll be taking it a lot easier on myself this year. So our goals for the year are:
1-Read twnety books I’ve either never read before, or which I never read critically. I’m going to go easier on myself on the actual book choices, however. No complaints if ten of those twenty books turn out to be from a midlist fantasy series or whatever. I will still be venturing out of the comfort zone some times, and I’ll definitely keep going on Proust. Beyond that, it’s whatever I want.
2-Fifty-two blog posts. These can be anything, from a one-line note that I caught Paraguayan Death Flu to more Bonus Creativity. That’s an easy enough goal.
3-Get Book the First out of my head. That means finishing the current round of editing, throwing say twelve more queries out, and if that doesn’t pan out e-publish the thing and be done.
4-Work on the actual, not abandonned Book the Second. Goal for the year is to get to the “better finish it than abandon it” stage (so probably about 66% done or so)
5-Make progress on improving this site.
Overall, the goals aren’t super ambitious I think, but I want to focus on the means this year. So our ground rules:
1-No taking on distracting projects. I’ll take paying writing work, but beyond that it’s just the projects I’ve talked about (and sorry, but the Europa Universalis Let’s Play isn’t going to pan out, at least not on a World Conquest.)
2-I have to put some work in every day on actual “writing career” stuff. It can be editing a single page of the book, just doing some updates on the tags and categories for old posts, writing one goddamn sentence in Book the Second, or whatever. For what it’s worth, I’ve put that rule into effect a bit over a week ago, and so far we’re good.
3-No putting myself into crazy pressure situations. So no big to-do lists, no challenges, no NaNoWriMo hopes.
So that’s what we’re focusing on this year.
More Steps Forward
I’m having trouble getting over the last few shots life has taken at me.
The writing career isn’t progressing. I’m not enjoying my current job situation. And as mentioned, my personal life has been hell lately.
So for now I’m going to go easy on myself. The goal for now is to make small progress every day, no more and no less. A page of revisions, some work on a synopsis, minor improvements to the blog/site… that’s enough for now.
Reading-wise, I’m not being super-ambitious this year. Another Proust book, a pair of current-gen fantasy author… that’s pretty much it. We’ll see how I feel in a week or two.
Fuck 2017
Well, 2017 was a mediocre, frustrating year on the “becoming a writer” front.
It was good on the personal side, until we lost our unborn daughter (and I almost lost my girlfriend to infection too.) So any motivation and goodwill I had left for that year is gone.
Honestly, I want to write an upbeat, “but 2018 will be DIFFERENT” post, but I don’t have it in me yet. Right now, I’m in a hell of a funk and I can’t seem to find a way out of it.
It just feels like I should throw in the towel on everything, just focus on watching TV shows, and otherwise stop trying to accomplish anything of note.
I imagine it’ll pass, but…
Crunch Time!
So, where are we on our goals for the year?
1-Read ten (10) new books:
I’m at 9.5. Last one is Pride and Prejudice, which is a bit of a slog (it’s good, but just not to my taste.) Definitely doable by end of year.
2-Write one blog post every week:
Already done. Admittedly a few of those were low-content notes and the like, but I think I’ll post enough by the end of the year to make that a moot point.
3-Be done with Book the First:
As a reminder, here’s what that goal meant:
That means either finding an agent, or self-publishing the book.
I’ve mad a lot of progress on e-publishing the book, but no way I can do it by end of year. And I’m not planning on querying any more this year, and I have no live query. That’s a failure (though not from lack of trying.)
4-Finish and start shopping the short story I’m currently writing:
Project dropped, because it was splitting my focus too much at a time when I couldn’t afford it. I still think trying to get a short story published would be a good idea but it needs to be a better short story project than the one I had.
Still a failure.
5-Take this website to the next level:
Nope. Admittedly, I kind of need an art direction for this first. But failure so far (although I doing at least the backend work would be a good first step, and that’s doable by end of year.)
6-Finalize my plans and start work on the Next Series:
I think that’s a success. Not a definite, clear success, but good enough for a pass.
So – my focus for the last month of the year will be backend work on the site, and finding a short story idea that I can somehow get published (and hopefully, at least make a good start on it.) Three acceptable successes and two goals in significant progress are good enough for me to accept my output for the year.
Sick Again
So, the one no-qualification-needed downside of having a kid is that they get sick, and that their bugs tend to mutate into sci-fi style superinfections.
My son brought home a common cold that morphed into an ear infection for him. For a dad, that’s hard to take: I want to make sure he’s fine always. So goodbye free time, I need to take care of my boy.
And then I get sick too, but I don’t get the common cold. I get something that’s a mixture of cholera and terminal sepsis. Or so it feels like, anyway. Kid-empowered common colds do that, apparently.
So… I’ve literally done nothing in the last two weeks. I mean, I was able to get to work and take care of my family, but beyond that it was “crash on the couch, hope to be able to go to sleep before five AM.”
Good thing the “get the book e-published by December” is off the books for the moment. I’m still pushing through the latest reread, because regardless of how things turn out agent wise another reedit cannot hurt, but it’s slow, slow going.
But I have vacation time coming up. Which probably won’t result in any meaningful progress given the way things have been going this year, but we’ll see!
Health Issues
So I’ve been sidetracked by health issues for the last few days. At this point, I’m just going to need to reschedule my deadlines. But fear not, I shall return!
The Great Fall Task List
All right, so what am I planning for the rest of the year?
1-Writing an average of 500 words a week on Book the Second. That’s not a lot, and I feel I should be able to do better than that, but let’s stick to something I’m sure I can do.
2-Get back on track for my blog schedule, my reading list, etc. I’m on track for the reading list, being almost done with Proust (and then the rest is just entertaining fiction or short.) For the blogs, I have thirty Secret Project blog posts ready to go (with more in the pipeline) so I should be able to make up for lost ground fairly easily.
3-Finish a thorough review-and-fix of Book the First and have it published online. My revisions are the main holdup, although I’m also waiting on a cover page suggestion.
4-Once I get my cover page, I’ll do the long-awaited switch-to-a-custom-look for this blog. At the same time, I’ll officially try to turn that into an “official” writing blog, complete with tip jar to beg for money and email to ask for writing jobs.
To get that to work, I’ve decided to rely on an computerized todo list – I’m using Todoist – so that I can manage my time efficiently. I still need to write down everything I need to do but at least I can do that once when I’m motivated, and then have the guilt to motivate me. We’ll see how this works out!
Vincent D's Blog 