I am a busy person. We know that, right? I'd be busy if all I ever did was write. I'd be a happy busy person, too -- but I'm not particularly unhappy with the rest of my work. I like my work. It is all writing related, at least, and not a lot of people get the chance to work in so many different ways within the field they love.
Forward Motion takes up the most amount of my time, but in many ways it's the least amount of work. I fret over it more than I work with it most of the time. I have wonderful moderators there who do far more of the actual site work than I do most of the time. I spend a lot of time coming up with ideas that I work though and see if I can make them work for the site. Quite often, I can't find the clear path that would make them viable. I don't give up on them, though. I think the answers will still come at some point. I obviously just need to fret over it some more. So I have hidden projects on the FM site, still looking for the one key that will make them work.
Vision is a different situation. Vision for Writers was my idea from the start, which is why it was always housed on lazette.net and not at Forward Motion. The back issues went to the Forward Motion site only after I took over there. We put Holly's name on it at the start because her name is gold -- but once she stepped away from FM, we decided to take the name off of Vision, which she had very little to do with anyway by that point. So Vision has always been my baby and I have fretted for ten years at making each issue. I've managed so far, but again it's from the help of others. If they didn't leap in to help, Vision never would have made it this far. There are some issues where it's a fight to get it done, to get it paid and to get it posted -- but I've managed so far.
The weekly newsletter for DAZ3D.com actually pays me. This is a rather startling event, given the amount of time I spend on things that don't pay me. It's not terribly difficult work, but it is time consuming and after 150 weeks of this work, it's sometimes hard to come up with something new to say. I have a lot of imaginative leeway in what I write about the new Platinum Club items, though. It's frustrating at times, but in almost three years, I have not missed an issue. (There were two weeks when they were doing something special -- actually four weeks, but I had done the newsletter the first week before they told me they were doing something special that week. Then I did something for the next week before they said it was actually for the entire month. LOL)
It's actually fun work a lot of the time. And it pays me.
The other work that pays me is writing, of course. But I spend so much time on those other three items that writing, even with my best intentions, waits on the wayside while I get other things done. I still manage to write quite a lot because it is what I do for fun. Even my submissions have been few and far between over the last few years. I'm changing that, which means a lot more attention to final drafts, rather than first drafts. I've already made that change over in the last couple years. I still write new material, and I do a few 'rewrite from scratch' stories where the original becomes a fancy outline. But I am also focusing on the final 'read aloud and fix' drafts, which I haven't done in a while.
I have two new projects this year, both of which will be starting up soon. The first is a set of classes to go with Holly's classes. I'll be covering short stories in the first one and probably some world building specific to science fiction and fantasy in the next. (Or that may be two different classes... it's hard to say right now.) I have scrapped three short story class versions so far, but I think I may finally have a clue what I want. The outline for the current version is looking better. If it keeps going this well, I may have a class ready by the end of the month. It would be about time. I hate it when things fight me, and I know a lot of this has just been because of a very long winter and a feeling of not making progress on anything.
My second new project is still a secret, but I have two people signed on already. I hope to have it somewhat up and going by the end of the month. This one has the chance of helping other authors and helping me. But it also means more non-writing work.
So there is my writing, stuck in the middle, so it seems from this list. It's what I want to do most, and it's what always calls me, so in some ways it's all right to have other things that need to be done and that I have to set as priorities. If I didn't have those, I'd be writing all the time. Nothing particularly wrong with that in my book, but it also doesn't hurt to have other work to do -- especially the stuff that pays. Amazing stuff, that money thing people sometimes give me just for writing, including writing the newsletter.
And in the last things I'm getting done, I have the new cover for Silky 1 done for the print edition. I think. I have gone through so many versions of this in the last week that I've come to realize I have less trouble editing books than working on this stuff. But it is a nice change for me, too. It gets me away from the writing stuff. Yeah, I love writing. There's nothing I would rather be doing. That doesn't mean it's what I should always be doing.
But you know, I think it's time I get back to it now.
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