The rest of the year is going to be very hard on me, I know this, so why the hell am I setting myself a huge writing goal on top of all of it? The more pressure I feel, the more I rise to the task. I work retail, and yesterday was day 1 of Christmas. That’s going to be a huge challenge given that I’m trying to settle into a new position (actually, I’m pretty settled, its more about turning around and excelling in my job now), and I have some travel coming up, and my wife’s surgery on top of it. She’s having hip work done, and if you know us, you know what’s going on, if you don’t, well, understand there’s at least 12 weeks of recovery time from this, and that overlaps pretty much all of Christmas. It’s 12 weeks where she can’t walk (for at least 6 weeks not at all), after that, crutches, and can’t do anything around the house, won’t be able to do much to care for our daughter. It’s just a fact of the next 12 weeks, not a complaint or anything.
I need to finalize my pitch materials for Inside, and will probably work on that tonight. By the end of October, I hope to be shopping stories and agent hunting.
I’m changing around what I’m doing with the blog for Inside, and there’s more in the post on that blog. The Hidden will go on the backburner for a bit. I’ll work on the next storyline a little probably starting in December. It’s already written in script format, so doing a prose version won’t take very long. Just need to let the batteries on Malcolm recharge.
So I’ve given myself some big goals on top of this, just to see what I can come up with. There’s going to be a lot of writing, both here and stuff I’ll save to submit, and stuff for a few other sites. I’ll be working primarily on “Inside” and End of the World Times, but there are also some short stories and other things running around in my head.
But I also want to use this site to bring more writing instructions and ideas into my audience’s head. I’ll be resurrecting the idea of Stories from a hat, and I’ll post what I draw each week, and if I come up with something, I’ll post the results. I’ll also post some pictorial writing prompts and other writing challenges. But don’t think I’m going at this alone. I want you to participate in this, too. So here’s the idea. I’ll post prompts on Fridays, and Stories from a Hat on Sunday. You have a week on stories from a hat. You have the weekend on the Friday prompts. The idea is to make the Friday prompts more of a flash exercise. Send them back to me, and I’ll post a follow-up containing all, or the best depending on how this grows.
For those of you in the area, the Compulsive Writer’s Support Group will be meeting every Sunday. Get a hold of me for info on that. I’m posting my public events or other interesting things I’m doing in the calendar widget on the right side of the blog here.
All of this is designed to get me back into a state of flow, which is really the only place I want to be right now, and has been harder and harder to achieve these last few years. Instability works against flow more than you’d imagine, and I’m done with it. Time to get past it.
After this quarter year, life should be changing significantly, and I’ll be in better places. I keep telling myself this. Someday it will be true.
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