Home Posts tagged "goalsetting FTW"

Tag: goalsetting FTW

2024 is Coming

To piggyback off Kit’s post (because I have no creativity whatsoever this week), I’ve been doing some noodling about 2024 and what I want to accomplish. This year has been a bit of a mixed bag writing-wise, some good, some not-so-good, and I’d like to ramp it up a bit, assuming there are no horrific crises or emergencies or general ongoing unpleasantness that makes things, well, unpleasant. So let’s talk about how things went this year first, shall we? I had a few goals. They were: To publish an erotic contemporary romance novella on Radish (similar to Kindle Vella), which was a pivot/experiment to see how readers would respond to my writing in a different genre. Result: The novella, BAV, as I am calling it, is about 1/3rd done. It’s on hold a bit while I figure some stuff out. It ended up being a bit deeper than I’d intended, delving into subjects like parental control, religious cults, and BDSM. Sooo I am deciding if I want to go all in, or if I want to rein it in some. To finish my anthology story. Result: I rewrote it twice, and started yet another rewrite which I believe will be the last. It just wasn’t working the first two times. It’s about 5,000 words now. Again, on hold, but I have full intentions of finishing. This antho has had a floating deadline, so I’ve been sort of waiting for the muse to get back on board with this one. To…

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It’s Alive!!

…And no, I’m not talking about Frankenstein. Although I could draw some very interesting parallels — stay with me, here. Okay, so let me start from the beginning. Every January (or in the case of this year, February because reasons), I pick a languishing novel out of my pile to start the new year off with. I don’t actually continue working on it, but I give it a bit of time, just to keep it in the background of my mind, refill the well, remind myself that it still exists, and experience the magic again. It’s tradition. Currently, I have three such novels. So I wanted to work on a different one from last year, so I chose Survivor, my oldest work to date. For those of you just joining the madness, Survivor is a psychological thriller/horror novel I started way back in 2004 for a two-year novel writing class I was taking at the time. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It ended up being one of the best books I’ve ever written — and the most maddening, for a variety of reasons. But I love it, believe in it, and this book haunts me. YES. So the goal is to get it published, naturally…except…um…it needs a major rewrite because 2004!Erin just wasn’t as good a writer as 2023!Erin. And well, the book’s in pieces, and — (Frankenstein reference, anyone?) well, it’s been majorly intimidating me for years, but…in 2019 or so, I decided that…

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Searching for Consistency in Chaos

Yeah, that’s basically been my life for…gosh…since August of last year? Not counting COVID, just business stuff, now. Somehow the editing part of my business exploded and I started getting jobs way more frequently than usual…one after the other. While this was totally awesome and lucrative, it required some adjusting — from the way I structured my workday to the way I scheduled each and every job. And, for the most part, it hasn’t really let up since. Which is awesome. And a bit rough. And then we also have COVID in there, and the usual life stuff, and my health crap and and and… So things have been seriously off kilter for awhile. So much that I haven’t written in months. One of my editing clients, who I routinely talk shop with, asked me the other day how the writing was coming along and I had to honestly tell him that I’d written 181 words in January and that was it for the year so far. And some poetry. And in years past I’d written every single day. My least prolific year back then was around 86,000 words, back when I spent a bit more time editing than drafting. My most prolific year? 399,000 words. Four standard novels, folks. But back then I had 9-to-5 day job. I came home, ate dinner, and wrote. Rinse and repeat. For years. It was not only a routine, but a comfort. I knew I could always go into my worlds and play.…

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