Been a while.
It’s been over a year since my last post. Habit is a timid creature, easily spooked. I had intended to get back to this sooner, but didn’t, and eventually I forgot that I should.
That seems to be a theme, after a fashion, which is mildly worrying, but nothing we can’t overcome through a bit of good, old-fashioned discipline. More on that later.
The Day Job is, as always, a draining thing. Doing something I’m not genuinely interested in, day in and day out, wears on me. Worse, it wears on me in a particularly insidious way; it’s quiet but it’s persistent, and eventually I don’t realize the drain is even happening. All that remains, after a while, are some common defeatist refrains.
That’s just the way it is.
That’s how the world works.
I need to eat, right?
Those are true, after a fashion (the last moreso than the former two; I do love me some eating), which of course makes the problem still more difficult to recognize.
And then we end up here, more than a year later, without as much to show for that year as perhaps could have been the case.
But opportunity, in the form of unemployment, knocks. Soon, The Day Job will be a thing of the past, and with that in mind, I have a few options.
I could search for another job. This is the safe option, inasmuch as anything is safe after our dear mustachio-twirlers in the finance sector basically broke the world for a few years.
I could do what I actually want to do. I could write. Full-time, “real” job writing. Forty hours a week at the computer, putting words in front of other words and managing the business that comes with that.
Will it work? I don’t know. But how can I, if I don’t put my nose to that grindstone and come away a little bloody?
So, with that in mind, here are my goals for the rest of the year:
1) Finish two novels, beginning to end – draft, edits, cover. I’ve started both, neither is as far along as it should be, but both will be finished by the end of this year.
2) Put up Pale Queen’s Courtyard on the Kindle, asap (target date is first week of April, though that depends on a few factors). Publishing is going through a sea change right now – more on that another day – such that self-publishing has to some extent emerged from a morass of stigma and is once again a viable option. Thanks, Mr. Gore. We couldn’t have done it without your tubes!
I’ve spent (perhaps not the first word that came to mind, but I don’t believe anything you learn from is truly a waste) a lot of time pitching to literary agents who, frankly, I’m no longer convinced are a going concern in the future of publishing, at least not in their current form. Now, it’s time to try something new. I haven’t decided whether I still intend to pitch directly to publishers yet. I suspect that the answer will to some extent depend on how much of a readership I can build up on my own.
3) Figure out the short story market. It’s back in full force (nb: it didn’t exactly go anywhere, but it certainly hasn’t been as hot as it is now for quite some time), once again due to the changing face of publishing. A few years ago, I would have told you that I don’t really understand short stories, because I was never much into reading them. My last writing projects, however, have been making use of vignettes, and I’m a bit more comfortable with the medium as a result.
4) Maintain a blog. One entry a week, minimum.
Simple enough, right? Four goals. One year. Let’s go.
