Saturday, December 29, 2001

Forward Motion is down. I hope this is the 'we figured out the problems and everything will be fixed by New Years' down. I really feel sympathy for the guys running that place. It's a great site, and it's lousy that it would develop trouble over the holidays. I mean there is a faint chance that these particular computer people even have family. It's rare, of course, but it could happen.

Last night I finally began to see the changes I want to make for work next year. It's not in the number of words I do so much as in when and how I do them. I need a different schedule to my life.

Early this year I said I was going to write at least 500 words each day before I started work on web sites and such. It was very nice, and I enjoyed it a lot. I don't know why I stopped. But that's going to be the first goal. Get back to putting writing first in my day, instead of holding it out like a carrot to make sure I get everything else done, and then limping through it at 3am. It means I have to admit that writing is the primary goal, not the web sites. And that's fine by me.

And other changes. Actually, I'm not going to start with writing. I'm going to start with an hour of work around the house. Feeding small useless creatures, picking up, sweeping. etc. Dishes. Get all of that out of my way so that I don't come out of my office later and feel like I've been a slug (even if I have been) because the place is a mess. I am not a good housekeeper, but I can do better than this.

But then we get back to writing and web work. Another experiment I did earlier this year was to confine web work to Wednesday-Friday, except for the occasional important info that had to go up right away. I'm going to start doing that again, too.

So, now I'm left with a couple things concerning writing to work out. Novels, short stories, rewrites and edits. Those are four different things and I believe I am going to try to schedule, on a regular day, a bit of work on each of them, with the understanding that if one piece takes off or needs to be completed, I can drop the others. So, let's say I have a schedule for a regular day that looks like this:

One hour house work
work on new novel
rewrite older piece from files
edit story/novel to go out
work on short story

And Wednesday-Friday Schedule looks like this:
One hour house work
work on new novel
web work
rewrite older piece from files
edit story/novel to go out
work on short story

All that means is that there will be less time to work on the other material on those days.

Into this will thread the stuff on Forward Motion and work for Vision. Sitting and just working on any of these projects without breaking to talk at Forward Motion would probably drive me to distraction, which sounds odd because some people would find Forward Motion a distraction. I don't. I find it a needed little break now and then.

Other plans? Yes. I plan to read more. In order to make myself keep on the nf stuff, I'm going to start doing something I did when I read the Durrants' Story of Civilization and the Cambridge Ancient History books -- write down a quote that catches my attention from each day. Those will likely go in my journal.

This year is going to be about focus. About not only working on new material, but working harder on making certain the stuff that is going out is ready to be sent. I won't be changing my hours, just making better use of them. It will probably mean less new words over all, but more material going out, which means more possible sales. And if I do enough sales... well, I can drop the web work entirely, right?

Now there's a goal. (grin)

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