July Retrospective

This retro is a touched up version of what was prepared before July 29, 2020. On that morning, the best and sweetest creature I have ever known passed unexpectedly in my home, and I have been a mess of ups and (mostly) downs since. I appreciate your understanding as I try to recover. 

Monthly Totals

Total words written: ???
Days missed: a lot
Average WPD (words per day): not as many as I’d like

This month was CHAOS – I bought a new house, moved, and have been spending a lot of time not only making the new house a home, but also figuring out my next moves as far as my professional life goes. 

For just a taste of things I’m up to:

• PATREON! Many times I will bring up that I have a blog to someone I know, and almost immediately they ask if I have a Patreon page. I am a little embarrassed to admit, but I never really interacted much with this site. After the fifth person asked me for a link, I finally decided to get with the times. The tiers and benefits, etc. will evolve as I figure everything out, but if you’d like to take advantage of it while also supporting my goal of being a full-time writer, please take a gander.
• Medium. If you want to support me, but don’t really have the funds to do so directly, consider checking out (and sharing) my attempt at working with Medium. As an experiment, I’ve just imported a post from this blog into their site, but I will eventually be writing posts unique to Medium as well. 
• A secret project! I was asked to collaborate with another peep on a project that I am absolutely stoked to start on, but I will not be sharing the information on here just yet. I will definitely be sharing it as soon as I can on Patreon first, naturally, so don’t be shy about being a little Mayhem-curious.

What Went Well

• I got thrown out of whack in buying and moving into this house, but I am slowly starting to settle back into my writing groove. 
• I now have my new writing space and it is beyond amazing. No longer am I in a literal closet or on the couch in someone else’s office. I have my own office that is quiet, bright, comfortable, and mine. I haven’t gotten my WRITING WALL set up just yet, but I have some neat plans for how to do this. More to come, naturally.
• After needing to get myself back together again, I have found the ability to work through being sore, tired, hungover, or otherwise “not in the mood” to write. This is a lesson that everyone who wants to write professionally needs to understand: you can’t just not write every time something isn’t perfect. You will never produce enough work to make a living. I have known this, but haven’t yet seemed to be able to do this until recently. Maybe now that I have a place I can call my own, on top of pursuing other avenues for funding, I finally feel like I can take myself (even more) seriously. I am reading this line now, and I’m keeping it in because it is usually very true. But thinking about my current state, I think I can hear God laughing in my face about this idea.

Lessons Learned

• I need more time to write! I wake up typically at about 6 am and keep hitting snooze until about 6:30. After which I go make coffee and stare into space until my brain caches up to my body at about 7 – sometimes even actually drinking the coffee in the process. My financially relevant job starts at about 9 am most days, so that gives me just two hours to do what I want to do. So I have changed my alarm to go off at 5 am every morning, and am trying not to snooze any longer than 5:30. It’s only an extra hour, but it feels like I get miles more work done. Miles? Piles? Llamas? I don’t actually know what you measure work in, but it’s more now than before.
• As you probably already read in my post about research, a lot of what I have published on this blog is fluff, and I’m not a fan. While there’s nothing wrong with fluff exactly, I would like to have a habit and a reputation for writing something of a little more substance. That goes for both fiction and nonfiction. Plus, I’m here to learn, so let’s get to learning!

Goals or Action Items for Next Month

• Set up my WRITING WALL. This will probably be a temporary set up at first, because I have some plans with magnetic and whiteboard paints for extra fancy, but I need something to get me back on track visually.
• Get my Patreon more fleshed out and maybe actually have a patron or two.
• Have a better business plan written up for what is, essentially, my writing business.
• …learn how to write up a business plan. 
• And of course: WRITE MORE. SUBMIT MORE. BE REJECTED MORE. Always a goal, not because I want to be rejected, but because the more rejections I get, the closer to acceptance I get!

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What are your goals looking like for next month? How did your goals from last month turn out?

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Upcoming!

I have recently had the privilege of buying a house, and if you have also done this, you’ll know that the process is stressful, fluid, and chaotic. We were supposed to close Monday but it kept getting pushed back day by day until two days ago. Internet, having been turned off three days ago, was restored last night, so I haven’t had the time nor resources to produce a worth-while post for you all for today.

I have a post half-done in the style I want the rest of my less opinion/experience-based posts to be written, and I am SUPER excited to have it ready for you next week.

I’ll see you then, folx.

My Goal Setting Story

This planner is a TAD out of date…
Photo by Breakingpic on Pexels.com

A few months ago when I began writing posts for this blog, I had a goal: write enough posts that I could have 20 weeks worth of posts at the ready. This would allow me to schedule them, then get to writing fiction. With fiction, I would write one flash fiction story draft in a week, write a new flash fiction story in the next week, edit the first one in the third week, and then finish up editing the second one the week after that. I would be able to do this for 20 weeks – that’s approximately 5 months, or 10 stories. I would take a little bit of time to write up cover letters and find places to submit the stories I wrote each month, and then get back to writing while I waited to hear back. Adorable.

I outlined, and wrote, and re-wrote, and edited. I honed the process over time so that I could write faster and better starting with the first draft. Eventually I outlined 20 posts, but only actually finished about 8 of them. Close enough, I thought. I could just start scheduling them and go from there. 

Then I had the idea that I could alternate between writing fiction and writing posts, since I had 8 weeks of posts under my belt. Including retrospectives, that was 10 weeks. So I tried that.

Truth is, when I have the pressure to do well on my mind (and little recent practice under my belt), it takes a lot longer than a week to write flash fiction. “Flash” also tends to morph into “short.” When I didn’t have the pressure there, I could write a first draft of flash in a day, so I thought I was giving myself ample time to deal with not only the writing but writer’s block as well. Apparently not.

Anyhow, I shifted from flash to posts to working on worldbuilding for a novel I want to write during NaNoWriMo this year, and sometimes I would switch between them in matters of minutes. I kept track of my word counts, so I knew I was writing something, but it didn’t feel like it. I was making little to no progress, and it only got worse once I realized my older pieces I wanted to spruce up for publishing needed major rework. Was this due to my newfound perfectionism or because they were written in a day? 

Mmm…probably both. 

But I kept pushing, kept switching, kept flailing and failing, until I found myself headed for burnout. I didn’t really know what to work on or when. I set up a schedule which helped for a little while, outlining that I’d work on fiction in the morning, blog posts at lunch (during the work week, since I have to have a “real” job for now), and then school work or whatever was most pressing after. It felt better, having some order. But I quickly devolved into chaos again.

I can’t even remember what spurred my decision to start writing out my goals, but whatever it was, I’m thankful for it. I’m still working out the kinks, and I’ve discovered that I really need to have stuff like goals and task lists very visible all the time, but here’s what I’ve started with, if you want to follow along at home:

By the end of the year, I want to:

• Finish the first draft of The Dragon (mostly during NaNoWriMo, naturally)
• Submit my stories to LitMags ~30 times (I’ve given up on the rejection goals for this year, since that requires them actually getting back to me by December 31st)
• Finish reading 12 more books
• Manage to post on my blog every Saturday until the end of the year

So I guess it’s just time to start working, right? WRONG. Your plan is bad and you should feel bad. And you probably will if you try to make that work – I know I did. Hence this article!

Breaking it Down

Knowing these specific goals, I can now break them down into smaller ones. For finishing The Dragon (I am slowly starting to hate this name, but it’s simple enough to work with it for now), I will need to make sure I finish character development, worldbuilding, and plot/story planning before November – or at least as much as I can before then. I will naturally find holes that can’t be filled until I write scenes, and in the spirit of NaNo that’s a no no. Then during November, it’s fifty thousand words I’ll need to write in thirty days. 

For submissions, if I submit one story five times each month, then I can reach this goal. That means that I’ll need to finish writing/editing/polishing at least one story a month and submit it to 5 different places. This is going to definitely be a stretch considering my current burnout problem and also NaNoWriMo kind of conflicting with this goal, but that’s okay. I won’t die if I fall short, but it gives me something to reach for.

To read 12 more books is simple: read 2 of them every month until the end of the year.

Finally, posting every Saturday is just as simple as the last goal: don’t miss a Saturday! That’s making sure I finish polishing up about 4 posts a month.

But I’m not done yet!

Breaking it down even more

For The Dragon, breaking it down further is a little more difficult, mostly because characters, setting, and plot are so interconnected. Basically I’m just going to start with character development and plot first and go from there. I’m trying out Lisa Cron’s Story Genius method for this book, just to see how it goes. Don’t worry, I’ll write about that in the future.

For submissions, I’ve already got several short stories started and lined up for this year. I’ll need to rework and rewrite them, which I hope to do in the first two weeks of each month. Then I’ll let it rest for a few days while I try to find places to submit, then head back into editing and rewriting for the rest of the third week. The fourth week I’ll let it rest for a day or two, then polish it up and write the cover letter for the story of the month. 

Every twoish weeks, I’ll be reading one book, and each week I will finish up and polish a post. 

Also every week, I will be going even further and trying to set up every day so that I will make sure I do a little bit of what needs to be accomplished each week. Once I have everything checked off my list for the day, I can relax. 

This list doesn’t include the things I’m doing for work or class or just being alive in a society of laws in general, but I have included those into my plans. In fact, because there are so many things I need to get done, I have also made sure to prioritize my goals so that if I need to remove some things, I know what to axe first.

To use my writing goals as an example, I will be lowering the number of submissions first. I still want to have experience for finishing and submitting pieces, so I won’t be nixing that goal entirely. Next will be lowering the number of books to read. Then I might end up having to just finish the prep work for The Dragon and complete the first draft early next year. I’m really hoping I don’t need to take anything off of the table completely, but if I do, it will probably end up being The Dragon. That’s mainly because of the amount of sustained effort required to see that kind of project all the way through combined with the fact that next year I should have a lot more free time to work on it, so I can catch up quickly. Everything else has a cumulative effect on my skills, so they need to stay.

This is actually the beginning of making SMART goals. I might end up setting these up in the future, but I am taking it one step at a time for now.

Update:
Since I am still going to be working a full-time job in November, I am most likely going to end up nixing The Dragon until next year unless I can get enough posts written and all the prep work done before then.

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What about you: do you have a goal-setting system of your own you’d like to share?

My Experience Shifting Between Hobby and Professional Writing

See? He’s professional now because of the bowtie!
Photo by Gustavo Fring on Pexels.com

I’ve written a retrospective, but no posts about my experiences. This is what I had originally intended for this blog, I just haven’t felt like anything I’ve done or been through was worth mentioning yet. I’ve started to reflect on what’s changed, however, and I wanted to talk a little bit about the overall shift of attitude and habits between hobby and professional writing. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t earned a dime yet, but I have committed to writing in a “professional manner,” so there’s still at least a subtle difference.

When you’re writing as a hobby, there’s zero pressure to do well. Don’t like a story you’re writing? Toss it. Don’t want to finish it? Don’t. Is editing the bane of your existence? Forget about it. There’s no reason to agonize over tone or flow, and if you write something that’s not great but still okay, that’s fine. No one is going to read it anyway.

The shift that happens when you try to write professionally, is that you have an obligation to keep going. Don’t like a story you’re writing? Figure out why and fix it. Don’t want to finish it? Too bad. Is editing the bane of your existence? Deal with it. “Git gud,” as the kids say. 

This isn’t to say that I’m not enjoying this. On the contrary, I feel that it lends the credibility I needed for my new addiction profession. I no longer feel like a child now that I’m paying attention to schedules and I’m actively reading about writing. I’m setting goals and objectives, planning out my learning and doing all of the career ownership I never did in any other job I’ve had before. I enjoy this and take it more seriously than anything else in my life, and it feels…purposeful. Liberating. It’s why I’m doing the retrospectives and keeping tabs on metrics. I’m my own boss, yes, said with all the puffed up pride as the next guy. But I’m also acting as my own manager. 

I’m sitting in my new writing spot as I type this. My “writing spot” has moved multiple times over the past couple of months, indicative of the changes I’ve gone through. There’s a lot more pressure now, but it feels good. When I write something terrible, my first thought is still “oh god, why?” but that’s followed closely by “How can I make this better?” and “Editing this will be great practice for me.” It’s a strange shift, going from a fixed-mindset to a growth-mindset. I’ll have to write more on that as well. 

We are getting closer and closer to the day when I’ll be able to actually quit and write full-time, though I’m not counting this as my “be a full-time writer” goal until I’m actually making money from it. I also don’t have delusions that I’m going to write the next Big Thing that earns me millions, but I suspect that I might be able to make enough each month to cover the gap between what my partner makes and what we need to both make rent and eat out a time or two. 

This gets me to the part where I write a little more about the lessons I’ve learned in this process.

Lessons Learned Thus Far

Letting a piece rest

When you cook meat, you always want to let it sit at room temperature to rest for a little while. This allows all the juices to redistribute, otherwise when you carve it, you’re just going to have a wet cutting board and dry meat. When you finish a draft, what I’m learning is you want to let the story rest, lest you cut into it for editing and…your story juice gets…you know what? Terrible metaphor. I find that it gives me space and clarity. It sounds a little less like my own writing and it makes it easier to tear apart. The longer a piece rests, the easier it is to edit, but you don’t always get that luxury. Letting it rest between edits is useful as well, especially if you change a significant portion or are doing rewrites.

Setting your objectives

If you have a lot of projects you are trying to get done all at once (say, a blog, a book, and a short story or five), it may begin to feel like you aren’t making progress on any of them. I felt this. It was like I was pressing the pedal all the way to the floorboards and my wheels were caught in mud. Pulling away from everything and writing down exactly what I wanted to accomplish this year made it clear where I wanted to go, and writing down exactly what I aimed to accomplish when gave me a plan for how to get there (this might actually be the next article, since it has been so helpful). This allowed me to simply trust in this plan, as long as I could stick to the daily tasks. It also allowed me to plan for time off. That brings me to another item:

Burnout suuuuuucks

I cannot say this enough. If you are trying to get through a night class, do homework, work full time, and start a brand new career, you will need time to rest. Not having the clear plan I mentioned in the last point combined with a need to be constantly working sapped the life out of me and reduced me to a panicking, sobbing mess two or three days out of the week. Don’t be like me–er, the old me. Be more like the me now. Whatever – don’t burn yourself out is the important bit. Plan for down time.

Find a writing group

I haven’t actually done this one yet, and I hate it. I need to have someone who I’m not married or related to read my work for feedback, and I need to get better at critiquing others’ work as well. Why the second one? It’s important to learn from your own mistakes and writing habits, but you get double the lessons out of learning from someone else’s as well. There also inherent risks involved in writing groups, but as long as you remain aware of them, it makes for a great way to grow.

Sometimes you need to completely start over

The other day I was working on a flash fiction piece that I wrote the first draft for a year or so ago. No matter what I did, nothing seemed to work – the descriptions were clunky, the piece had no point, nothing really mattered. I hated it, but as we’ve just established, professionals at least try to finish what they start. For a week I wrote a paragraph here, did some copypasta from the first draft there. Removing lines, adding words. Taking out and promptly putting commas back in (seriously, I have a problem). In frustration I opened a new document and started from scratch. In about an hour I had something far better than I’ve written in a long while. 

Once you figure out that a piece isn’t working, and you can’t get it to – nix it. Toss it. Kill it. Not the whole idea, but parts that aren’t working. My example was flash fiction, so I could afford to start from scratch all over again, but if you’re working on a chapter that doesn’t fit – get rid of it and try again. No need to throw away the book, but the chapter can go, I promise. You will soar once out from under that dead weight.

Most importantly, be honest with yourself

If you know you aren’t going to work on Tuesdays, don’t try. Make that your Saturday. If you know that you like your spouse and you want to spend time with them once they get off work, make sure you finish your tasks for the day before then. If you know that you’re very “out of sight, out of mind,” hang your tasks and schedule on the wall where you see them every day. Stay mindful of what works and what doesn’t, and don’t be afraid to change something, even for a day, if you think it will help.

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What have you been learning about yourself or your process recently? Any specific tips to share with the rest of us about making the switch to “professional?” Share in the comments below!

Juneteenth and Being Better

Yesterday was Juneteenth. A quick summary for the uninformed people reading this: it is a celebration of when Union Soldiers finally got down to Texas to tell the slaves they were free. This happened two and a half years after the law had passed. The reasons for the delay are unverified, but either way, this day has been celebrated since 1865 (or I guess 1866, since it happened in 1865). 

Have you never heard of it? Me either. I just found out about it a few days ago. There is a lot more information about this holiday, and I urge you to catch up on the history our systemically racist school systems never bothered to teach properly. 

So much is happening right now. Oppression in the US is still very real, Black people are dying in the streets, and something must be done. I hesitated writing this post for a number of reasons, not the least of which was I didn’t know where I fit in this conversation. But we all have a responsibility to participate. But how do I do that? 

I could lament here about all of the ways I have been racist (why the hell hadn’t I ever considered that Black culture might have holidays I didn’t know about? Or even ask questions to try to understand in general?), but this wouldn’t actually do anything. I could do what I imagine a lot of companies are going to try to get away with (something like post a black square for the likes and then act like nothing ever happened), which is not only useless but offensive. Or I could pledge here and now to actually be better.

I don’t have much of an audience at the moment (I think last week I had literally 3 people who looked at this site including myself). However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t use what little platform I have to try to keep Black voices heard. 

On Twitter I will continue to retweet as much as possible to help spread their messages. On this blog I’m already planning on adding posts that highlight books and services related to reading and writing – there is no reason why I shouldn’t make every effort to have a balanced mix of heritages, cultures, nationalities, genders, sexualities and other minority groups represented. 

Online and in real life I am working on building my confidence in speaking about racial issues, while trying to refrain from making it all about me (which I’m failing at in this post I think) or being condescending/white knighting. I’m also making every effort to actually seek out diverse sources for everything I consume now, from music to books to the stores where I shop. All of this will be done on top of learning as much as I can and accepting any feedback I am given. My comments and contact page are always open, or you can connect with me on Twitter or Instagram (links at the bottom of the page). 

I know this post doesn’t “solve racism” and I know that is doesn’t automatically make me a good person. But I hope it is an acceptable start as I learn how to do better and how to be better. I challenge all the privileged people reading this post to figure out their own plan for doing better and to publicly pledge to stick to that plan. There is a lot of work to be done, and we privileged need to do the heavy lifting.