scrubjayspeaks

Challenge #4: In your own space, create some goals.

Hmm... I usually do a fair bit of goal setting at the start of the year. Or, well. Not necessarily goals, per se. Assessment. I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I do like to see where my projects are at and spend at least a little time thinking about where I'd like to head.

This year--or more accurately, after *last* year--that feels presumptuous, to put it mildly. Imagine the wild hubris of thinking things will be able to happen according to plans. With the added time and energy constraints of work kicking off the year with absolute madness, I haven't really done any thinking, let alone planning.

One thing I've found works for me, though, is tracking. It's not setting a goal, merely recording what happens for a given metric. In practice, though, monitoring a thing tends to result in my doing more of it. To that end, I'm keeping track in a little spreadsheet of all the books I read this year.

My reading habits are so sporadic, trying to set a specific goal for number of books/pages/whatever in a year would be an exercise in random guessing and futility. But if I just keep track of what I read and when I finish it, I'll probably end up making it through more books than I otherwise would.

One thing I would like to do this year, but which is so lacking in concrete plans as to hardly qualify as a "goal," is get my various (nearly) finished drafts posted. I've got a sequel to an MCU fic that has been written for the last...uh...five years? It just needs revision, and I'm not even sure it needs a particularly heavy hand on that count either. (Depends on how perfectionist I'm feeling, I suppose, which is currently rated at "five years' worth" of perfectionism, so.)

I've also got an original piece that, long story short, has been professionally edited, has cover art made, and is two-thirds of the way coded. I just need to finish the layout for the pdf version and upload the blasted thing. For money! A thing I theoretically do! Somehow!

I do have one, tiny, formal goal for this year. I want to take more pictures. I'm absolutely rubbish at managing to drag out my dSLR, even though I really enjoy using it. There's a decent camera on my new tablet, though, and I have that thing with me much of the time. (I don't have a smart phone, so I've never really gotten into the modern habit of snapping shots of everything around me.)

So my goal is to take one picture a day. Doesn't matter what device I use, what it's of, or if it's even remotely worth looking at. The sole requirement is that I point a lens at something and make the shutter operate at least once.

On the same principle as the tracking, though, I'm hoping that just forcing myself to think about something on a regular basis will indirectly get me doing it more. In this case, I might remember to get my digital camera out more often than at first frost, birthday beach trip, and Halloween, my traditional three times for remembering to take real pictures.

I am informed by my byzantine and eccentric personal calendar that today marks ten years since I made my first fiction sale. I am having some kind of emotion about this!

...oh, I'm supposed to identify that emotion? Nope, sorry, no idea!

It was a bisexual threesome romance set in a traveling carnival in a largely unspecified fantasy world. I was too scared to write any explicit scenes. It has some vaguely cryptozoological ideas in it and a light con job of sorts. I think (because I have not reread it in ten years, so who can remember?) it ended with the timid third leaving his conventional life of expectations behind to run away, not so much on a whim as on a hope. There was some weird kink hinted at, and there was an attempt (however imperfect) at diversity in the characters.

So there's some continuity in my life, that's for sure.

My god, I was twenty-three once? How is that possible?

Today is the five year anniversary of my first self-published fiction. Like, up for sale on Amazon, has a cover and boilerplate and everything, P U B L I S H E D.

And I have known this date was coming up, and I have expected it to cause unwelcome emotions. After all, I know to expect a drop every time I publish something, just from the adrenaline letdown; a reminder of my cumulative publications seemed likely to cause more of the same. And I'm hormonal and overworked right now, so my resistance is low. It's just that the emotions aren't coming from the direction I expected.

I expected the distress to be about how much I have or have not published in five years. It is not a lot! I am not well pleased by this, it's true. Especially when I very much need to transform myself into the sort of person who writes and publishes such a goddamn deluge of fiction, I can afford to live on that alone and stop killing myself in restaurants. Not producing fast enough is, like, my top anxiety gremlin.

Mostly, though, I was struck by the continued depth of my ignorance. Whatever I have learned about the practice of writing, from dozens of classes and articles and events and podcasts and mentorship, it does not seem to have made a dent. Writing still frequently feels like a mystery.

How do I get myself to write? Faster? More? Smarter?

Why do some stories finish in an instant? Why do some have endings that evaporate as I search for them?

How does plot work? Structure? Pacing? What are the reliable mechanics of story?

Why do some stories that seem to rush, burning, straight from my heart turn tepid and saggy when I try to revise them? Why do I need to tell some stories yet cannot make them work for anyone else?

How can I surprise readers when so much seems to have been said and done already? How can I surprise myself? Why is surprise necessary?

Where is the market for the stories I want to tell? Why do I have such a hard time reaching it?

What do I enjoy in stories? How can I hang onto that joy?

And sometimes, when I am feeling very low and can see only the flatlined sales and the magazine rejections:

What am I doing wrong?

I published that first little collection in 2013, when my entire life was falling apart. I'd had a nervous breakdown, I was a situational mute, I couldn't keep down food most days. I was seriously figuring out the logistics of living out of my car, because I was going to lose my home.

I put together this collection of flash fiction about robots and bodies and survival. I did it out of spite more than anything. To spit in the eye of the people and the world that were trying to eradicate me. I barely remember the process, because it all happened in a kind of fugue state. I taught myself everything from scratch in a couple months: how to finish, properly finish, stories fast and right; how to design covers, albeit rubbish ones; how to layout ebooks in four different formats across three different programs; how to run shop software off my site.

Five years on, and it feels like I have learned nothing. That my ignorance of storytelling and publishing both are so profound, I could never hope to rise above them.

AAAAAAAAH

Just submitted a story to a SF/F magazine. For the first time in...3 years. Yay! \o/

*runs from the room screaming*

AAAAAAAAH

EDIT: Aaand rejected in about 15 hours. D: Next target on the list doesn't open until Monday, so the story will go out again then. *sigh*