Writing Life: Changing Things Around

This last week, I have been publishing—ALL this last week—which drives me absolutely crazy, because I’d rather be writing… Plus it gives my mind far too much time to think about things. This week, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t getting enough done, that there were things I could do better, and my non-writing chore list has grown.

I started this year with some goals. They’re going to get done, but they’re going to look a bit different. Firstly, I don’t like having perfectly good anthologies and collections lying around doing nothing, so to speak. They need to be out in the wild where my readers can decide if they’d rather buy short work singly, or in a single collection. I’ll do a more in-depth post on the changes I’m making there, but you’ll start seeing a format change in progress reports from here on out.

Secondly, I discovered I work better in blocks, and, while that’s frustrating because it means there will be blocks of time when I’m not writing, it will also make tasking easier. I’ll be blocking in the last week of every month for administrative and publishing tasks, so I don’t fall behind.

Thirdly, the blogs, I have four. They will form part of my administrative tasks, but they also need to be updated more frequently. I’ll be blocking out a day each week to update them. For things like the art blog, that will mean you’re seeing progress a week after it happened instead of real time, but at least you will be seeing some action there. Ditto for the Indonesian blog, which has been sadly neglected this past week. The publishing blog can be updated ahead of time, so that will happen a lot more frequently.

Finally, this blog. For this blog, it will mean that I can prepare the things I want as regular features ahead of time. This includes finishing the Babes of London adventure series, making pokemon updates once a week – no more daily hatchling or whatever, and putting down thoughts on writing, when I think of them, but adding them to the schedule, rather than straight away. The In-the-Scanner reports will have to go up when they’re noticed, but that’s a lot less often than it was… for now, at least.