Happy Tuesday, squiders! Can you believe it’ll be July this week? I sure can’t!
I thought, since we’re halfway through the year (holy crap) that it might be good to revisit my yearly goals and see if I’m making any progress, so I can feel good about myself (or, I guess, feel like crap for being a failure. Time will tell!).
Let’s go and find my goals for the year so I can remember what I’m supposed to be doing.
Okay, so I have four categories of goals for the year. The first is reading–my normal 50 books a year, plus the requirement to have 1 book a month be something that’s been sitting around, and 1 book to be something off my library or Goodreads TBR lists. That’s actually been going pretty well–I’m about where I need to be for the year, and reading my TBR books has been really nice! I actually tend to get two (or sometimes three) TBR books done, usually because one is not immediately available, so I put it on hold at the library, and then it shows up shortly after.
This month I read two because I was getting one off the shelf at the library and the other happened to be right next to it.
The “read a book that’s been lying around for a while” goal has been less consistent, but it’s mostly getting done. The one I picked out for this month is a Gothic horror, and I read a Gothic horror book last month, and am reading a Gothic-y fantasy book at the moment, so I may switch that out here and read something else.
There’s the video game goal–to play five hours of video games a month on a new game or a game I’ve not yet beat (since I tend to replay the same games over and over) (and also hoard games). It’s not going great, which is so funny to me, because this was supposed to be an easy goal! But it’s not. I keep getting distracted by other things, or it feels like I need to have a big block of time to play in. Which is crap.
The third category is “other”–basically things like remembering to exercise (I’ve slipped a disc in my back, so mostly I’m just walking, but I am doing it daily), practicing my drawing (I just finished the trip journal from our cruise in March, so now I’ve got to get going on Scotland, and we can’t go anywhere ever again, omg), and, uh, those might actually be it.
On the writing front, my main goal is to get Book 1 ready for submission, which, as you guys know, goes poorly. Just when I was getting momentum, I had to switch to my Gothic horror (so much Gothic horror right now, ahhhhh) as the publication date got moved up. In theory I could have done more on that this month while the GH is with the editor, but I was gone for half the month, and to be honest, it felt a little weird to stuff it in for a week when I’ll get the GH back with comments on Friday.
The GH novella finishing and getting ready for publication goes well. It got finished, it’s getting ready for publication. It’s halfway through the editing process (my editor says it’s “solid” and “fun,” which are generally good, I think) so in theory for July I will just need to do some tweaks. (Fingers crossed for no big surprises.) I realized yesterday that I need to get going on a cover, that if I hire someone it will take them sometime to make it, or I need to make it myself and get it ready for cover reveals and other marketing stuff. And also there’s marketing to be done. Oy.
City of Hope and Ruin was the last major work I put out (not counting anthologies or short story collections), and I had Siri’s help on that since we co-wrote it, which was great from a financial/marketing work standpoint. Not really looking forward to doing it all on my own this time around. Plus CoHaR came out six years ago and I’m sure how things are done has changed. Yay.
Anyway. Writing goals. Book 1, not great, Gothic novella, about done in all ways.
Past that, I had some stretch goals, that involved editing/revising additional stories. My scifi horror novella. My cozy mystery. Oh, and I was supposed to finish my serial story and collect it as an ebook. I did finish that in, uh, April, I want to say, so I guess I should look at releasing as an ebook. The serial is scifi so not sure if I can wrap up that release with the Gothic release somehow.
Guess it’s time to relearn everything about marketing, yay.
Oh man, the serial will need a cover too.
In nonfiction land, I want to put out two more SkillShare classes. I’ve been working on the current one, about points of view and tenses, a lot this month, so in theory it should be done and up in the next couple of weeks, assuming we avoid the audio issues the last class had. I’m actually starting to get pretty good traction on SkillShare, so I guess we’ll stay there for now.
So, I mean, not too shabby. Could definitely be worse. Could be better too. I think I talked to you guys about Book 1 and the trilogy in general, and how I’ve been working on it for so long that it’s hard to put it out into the world where it could be rejected. There’s a lot of emotional baggage there, so if people have any tips, please lay them on me.
More master plots on Thursday. This week is Rags to Riches and the related plots of Underdog and Ascension (no related plots on the 36 plot list, which is definitely an interesting point). See you then!
