Report: Totally unacceptable.
I can't say as though I'm pleased with how this week has gone, but I'm optimistic. I don't know if it was that I burned out, if I got hit by the dysthymia, or both (I think it's likely that even if I burned out, the dysthymia would have come in as a consequence) but I'm taking steps to address the former just in case (even if I never burn out I'm still wearing a little thin) and the latter... Well, I'm managing there, I suppose. I need to do better keeping track of my lows if I'm going to figure out the pattern that I'm currently under and anticipate my depressive episodes before they happen, like I was able to do on my mission.
I have high hopes for the next week and for the next few months. I will be finishing Perfect Engine by the end of next week and have a good deal figured out for my planned YA novel Fox Sense and Circumstances. I'm also working on nutshells and outlines for eighteen short stories that I will be writing in February. I should get anywhere from 18,000 to 54,000 words (or even more) from these and have a total of twenty-five short stories written and being submitted here, there, and everywhere. After that I'll take the month off from writing stories for market (with the exception of Fox) and focus on outlining and writing stories for the blog, which won't be anywhere near as much of a hassle for me. Even if I write another 50,000 words for the blog in March it'll be with the intention of producing a backlog so that, come April, I can go back to focusing on short stories for the market and not worry about the blog.
With any luck, by April I'll have also completed a few chapters of Unlikely, a Harry Potter fanfiction that's been slowly developing in my head and is almost fully sketched-out at this point. Fanfiction won't be something that I'll ever be able to sell, of course, but it's a different kind of writing, almost but not quite like what I do for many of my Lovecraftian stories. In that way it's kind of a sabbatical in its own right, and it has the added benefit of having a ready audience from the beginning. There's more than one author that I can think of who built a writing career from a fanbase that was developed while writing fanfiction.
My comparative mythology book is nearing completion. I can't say for sure but I hope that it'll be done by the end of January. There's far less to be done now than there once was, so it's getting there. Definitely getting there.
There's a possibility that I'll be dropping this blog at least for the time being. I've made a friend who has expressed an interest in teaming up, and while I like many things about this blog the fact is that I need to be pragmatic. It may be my own little corner of the interweb but it's practically a haunted house. A living, growing thing, to be sure, but its halls are only occasionally wandered by a living soul, which makes its continued vitality off-putting to me in some ways. Like talking to the darkness when no-one's there. Of course you must build it before they come, but in the meantime it feels awfully creepy at times and I will welcome the opportunity to move to a better-read blog if that will indeed work out for both myself and the blog's current writer.
But I don't know for sure. Like I said, just a possibility.
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