Category Archives: Goals

July Goals (and a mid-year wrap-up)

Gozilla Vs. Kong picture
You go first! No, you! No, you! I insist!

I chose this image of Godzilla and Kong duking it out because it reminds me of how multiple projects demand a writer’s attention. More on that later.

June Update: I did not accomplish everything I set out to do in June, but I came pretty close. I meant to work on And the Devil Will Drag You Under every day, but, of course, sometimes life gets in the way. I meant to fully revise “The BIM” (now “Witness to the Scourge”). I also meant to fully revise “Sauromancy”. Instead, though, I partially revised “Witness to the Scourge”, and I revised “Zombie Processes” and submitted it to a writer’s conference I’m attending in a couple of weeks. I did get quite a bit done, though, so I’m calling June a win.

Mid-year submissions wrap-up: I’ve been submitting short stories to various short fiction markets pretty regularly this past year. Every Monday and Thursday, in fact. I may have missed the odd day here and there, but I’ve always made up for it the following day. So, at this point, I’ve submitted 61 stories. The result? 40 form rejections, 6 personal rejections, 1 withdrawal, 0 acceptances, and 14 pending rejections  submissions. If I can keep this up all year, I’ll have over 100 submissions for the year. I’m hoping to get at least one acceptance over that time.

July goals: I signed up not for Camp NaNoWriMo, but for Dream Foundry’s “Summer Stretch”. I suppose I should sign up for Camp as well, but, well… I didn’t. At any rate, I do have a goal of adding at least 31,000 words to And the Devil Will Drag You Under in July, which will bring the grand total up to 60,000+ words. That means writing at least 1,000 words per day. That’s accomplishable.

The problem of multiple projects: I have several projects that I really want to work on. I’m committed to finishing Devil, but I was reminded recently of a novel I wanted to work on at one point, The Book of Jonah, a genre-centered retelling of the Biblical text of that name. A fun fact: I once stated (on LiveJournal, of all places!) that I considered Jonah to be the funniest book in the Bible. And Guy Consolmagno, the head of the Vatican Observatory, agreed with me! I was so thrilled! I had met him at WorldCon previously, and chatted with him (ever so briefly) about religion and science. Then I read his book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial, and when I met him again I mentioned it. And he said, “Oh yes, you’re the one who thought Jonah was funny.” I pretty much melted into a pile of goo right then and there.

Anyway, there’s that project. And my pirate novel, of course, which looks like it wants to be a trilogy. And my horror-themed space opera fantasy trilogy, too.

THEY ALL WANT TO BE WRITTEN. All of them are fighting, Godzilla-vs-Kong-like, for my attention. And the main point I want to tell them is that I need to finish my Devil novel first. Because that’s been my problem all along; I don’t tend to finish what I start writing. So I’m committed to And the Devil Will Drag You Under. I’m gonna finish that.

Of course, one unsung voice in the writer’s head at this point usually says something like, “Yeah, but what if the project I’m working on sucks? What if the next one would be good?” And that, sadly, is a very loud voice in my head. I should learn to ignore it. To a greater extent at least.

In other news: I am writing this on my new laptop! It runs Windows 10. Normally, I would have simply slapped Linux onto this computer and left Windows behind, but in this case, I wasn’t sure if Linux would be compatible with all the laptop’s features that I was interested in: the fingerprint authentication, the touch screen, and so on. But the Kubuntu install disk offered no option for dual-booting. So I went ahead and installed Kubuntu 21.04 in a virtual machine (Virtualbox, for those interested) in Windows. It’s a poor man’s Linux box, I suppose. But why? Because all my writing over the past many years has been done on a Linux computer, and my version of Scrivener is a Linux port, and so on. Besides, I really like Linux.

I’m just a nerd.

Anyway, that’s my update. I hope you’re having a good day. And my reward to you for reading this far is this: a picture of Godzilla stomping through a peaceful Thomas Kinkaide village:

Godzilla vs. Thomas Kinkaide
RAWR!!

June 2021 Goals

Life! Life! Give my creation life!

I’m including this photograph of Gene Wilder from Young Frankenstein because I know how he feels: Excited! Pumped! Full of possibility! Except I think this particular image is from after his creation did not come to life, in which case he feels bitter disappointment. And that’s how I kind of feel right now as well. I did not quite meet my writing goals from last month, so I’m a wee bit disappointed in myself.

I had set myself a goal of working regularly on my novel And the Devil Will Drag You Under, which Facebook tells me (via posts I’d made about it showing up in my Memories) I’ve been working on for more than a year. I’d hoped to make significant progress by now, but I fear that I have not. I readjusted my completion goal so that instead of June 10, I now aim to complete the rewrite by August 12. I have all of June to work on it, and I’m planning on using Camp NaNoWriMo in July to push through it.

I also had hoped revise a short story or two, namely “The B.I.M.” and “Sauromancy”, as well as draft a new story, tentatively called “Metolius Descending”. None of that happened. I did, however, do some revisions on a story called “Zombie Processes”, which I wrote a few years ago. After the revisions I did (basically a complete rewrite), I think it has great potential.

School, at least, is over for the summer, so I will have more time to write. I didn’t do as well in my final class as I’d hoped; my final research paper on the information-seeking behaviors of cryptozoologists did not receive very high marks. At least I got a B+ in the class, though. With SJSU’s MLIS program, a B- or less means you have to repeat the class, and if you don’t do any better the second time around, you’re subject to academic probation. None of that nonsense for me! I do wish I’d picked a different information community than cryptozoologists, however. This one was… problematic.

So, that’s me in a nutshell for now. I hope to write at least one more blog post this month, so that’s a goal. So is working regularly on the novel, and revising “The B.I.M.” We’ll see what happens.

How are you?

April 2021 Goals

My God, it’s April already! Oh my God it’s 2021! How do these things happen?

I know, it’s all about time. Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Etc.

I didn’t meet all of my March goals. In review, I did launch Daikaijuzine 5 on March 21 the way I intended, so yay for that! I’ve also been meeting my school goals, so I win there as well.

Let’s talk about writing, though.

I did not complete the outline revision of And the Devil Will Drag You Under, but I made significant progress. So finishing that outline and beginning the rewrite is one goal for April.

I did not revise either “Sauromancy” or “The BIM” the way I had hoped I would, but I did revise “Mrs” and submitted that. No response from the market yet. Here’s hoping they like it.

I’ve also been submitting twice per week, every Monday and Thursday. So yay me for that! I intend to keep on doing that.

For more immediate goals, I intend to write and submit  short story to Grist Magazine’s “Imagine 2200” writing contest. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on April 12, so this will be tight, given that I have no idea what I’m going to write.

I think that’s it for my April goals. This coming Sunday is Easter, of course, which will be the perfect day to write about my religious beliefs, so look for that if that’s your sort of thing. Be well, and shoot for your goals!

 

March 2021 Goals

Well, my good friend T. M. Baumgartner (whose fiction you should definitely check out) has put up some March 2021 goals, so you know what? I’m going to do that too. Maybe make it a thing: a monthly goal post to keep myself honest.

I’m pretty busy (even without the kitten pics), so I guess I have goals in three main arenas:

  • Daikaijuzine: Publish the new release on the 21st. That means making sure all the contracts are in place and the authors are happy with the layouts of their stories and poems and what-not. After that, take a breather before reopening submissions sometime in April.
  • School: Weekly blog posts on my research topic for the month (information-seeking behaviors of cryptozoologists), plus a couple of small papers. Research! Writing! Fun!
  • Writing:
    • Finish up revising the outline for And the Devil Will Drag You Under. I’m using the Save the Cat Writes a Novel method to do so. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
    • Revise two short stories for submission.
    • Keep submitting 2-3 stories per week.
    • Finish reading and critiquing Top Secret Novel for writers’ group meeting on Thursday the 11th.

I also picked up a book called The Craft of Science Writing, so I’m going to be reading that, because the dream lives on.

That’s all I got for now. If my readers are especially nice to me, I might send out a newsletter as well.