Okay, Break's Over

Hey, folks. I bet that the two of you who follow this blog regularly are wondering what happened to my writing over the last while. Back in June, I reached my goal of 304,475 words for the year. Then on July 3rd, I posted my last this month in the books post talking about how the writing had gone in June. Since then, I haven't made a peep about writing. Not only that, but I've barely talked about publishing or making covers or doing audiobooks or any of the other things I was going on about so frequently this past year.

Yeah, I pretty much took an extended vacation. I said I was going to keep going on things. In fact, here's my exact words from that post:

Now, what am I going to do next month? Well, if it’s going to be my vacation month from writing with no specific goals, then I guess I’ll do the same for audio. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to do nothing. I’m already 30% of the way into Three Vampire Weekend, so I will do my best to get as much of that done as I can. I think I can probably get all of the book minus the big novella done this month. The novella, “The Elephant in the Room,” is going to take a month to finish all on its own, so that will likely be my goal for August, when it comes rolling around.

Boy was that a load of BS. I didn't do a single thing. I stopped writing for a little while, but along with that went everything else. The only thing I managed to do was get Undo published, and that was just because I had to work my way through that to edit Rish's reading for The Anklecast. 

What I claimed that I was going to do while not writing was to work on the preproduction outline of my next book, The Skeleton Crew, but I certainly didn't. I don't think I spent more than ten minutes even  thinking about it at all.

In doing this stuff, I discovered a little something about myself. It looks like writing every day is the base line that I have to stick to. If I let that slip away, then all the rest of my productivity goes with it. I don't know if it will always be that way, but for now, at least, I see that it is

After being a layabout for a while, it started to feel wrong to me. September was growing closer, and the opportunity to get going with the start of a new month kept calling to me. I pulled up a fresh document on Google Docs, and started listing off things that could be my goals for the next while, and with each addition, I felt more energized and inspired.

The line from the Sting song called "St. Augustine in Hell" kept coming to mind. I found a version of it on YouTube that you can play here:

That's right, break's over. Time to get back to it. I don't think that I ever felt better about myself than I have for the last year. The only time that comes close was the last time when I did pretty much the same thing in 2019-20. Only that time, I wasn't quite as productive as I was this year. I need to get back to doing the stuff so that I can feel good about myself again.

So, starting on September 1st, I began writing every day again. What is my goal for month? 500 words? 1,000 words? 1,250 words? 1,333 words? I'm not going to make a word count for now. This is going to be another first month of the year like I had in November last year. The real goal is just to make sure that I write every day. That's what I'm shooting for. I suspect that I'll get at least 500 words a day, but if I don't, I'm not going to beat myself up.

Next month, I'll give myself a big word count goal, and then we'll go onward and upward from there.

So, I guess the point of this is that I'm back. For the last three days, I've been writing on my story for Marshal Latham's contest over at the Journey Into... Podcast. I believe the contest was called the Journey Into Journey 2 or something like that. Oh, wait, Journey Into Journey: Illustrated Edition. While I work on that, I'll see if I can't get The Skeleton Crew planned out, so that I can jump into it once I finish Marshal's story.

I'll be back on here soon enough with a post about the goals that I started setting out. I think I need to ponder them a little bit, and also plan them out step by step to see if I can't manage to achieve them all. That's a pretty important thing. You can hit big goals as long as you break them up into smaller goals that you can keep up with day after day and week after week.

So, I'll see you with more of that stuff then.