Category: goals

Good. You are back. Or you have just arrived. Eh, either way, good.

Let’s get down to brass tacks first.

Word Count: 42,741 (Yeah yeah… only 3k more than last time)
Progression: Actually, my progression is my topic.

No, I will not write about writers block, fucking stupid. There are god knows how many things already written about that. No… this is a post about what the fuck I am going to do to finish this, and within 2016.

So. There. I said it and I meant it. I will be done with book 1 by 2016. Actually, my real goal is to be done by September, then final draft in November.

Let me start over.

I have a job. A demanding and ever increasingly difficult job. I hate the lack of time I have because of said job. I am lazy. I like being lazy. I want to lay around the house, and when inspiration hits me, I get off my ass to do whatever I want. If I wanna go make a glass of chocolate milk, celery with peanut butter and a salad, I will fucking do that. If I wanna zone out to Netflix and waste away untold hours of my life, I can go do that. I want to stay awake at night and sleep during the day. I live in the desert, so it’s cooler that way. I might vacuum once a month, if I am lucky – or unlucky. If I want to write far too late in the night, more words on my blog than my book, screw it, I can.

In order for some of those things to happen, I need to have a job in which I can. Or no job. I am sure one day my boss will read this blog, hopefully not before I quit, and not because I dislike her, if anything, she is one of the best manager’s I have had. No, I just don’t want to be brought into HR (read previous posts, I refuse to apologize for this). Anyways, hopefully, the day my boss reads this, it will be the day I can no longer call her a boss because I have made enough money to quit.

For over 7 years I have toyed around with this book, and I no longer want to play make believe. There is nothing more that I would like than to have success like Meyer, Sanderson, Tolkien, fucking Shakespeare… but, I will not delude myself. The possibility of that happening is small, but still obtainable – I refuse to believe it is not. If they can I can. I CAN make the book. I CAN make some money from it. I CAN finish my idea of a mostly perfect book. I CAN make a mark. I CAN DO THIS.

I had a crazy goal I set last summer of having 27 pages written a week. Fucking idiot. If any newbie is reading this, yeah I am one too, just know, if you set yourself a goal like that, just do it. Me? I am a wuss and, like I said, lazy. So that goal was not something I really strived for. Could I do it… yeah. Did I? Fuck no. Did it make me depressed every time I saw the calendar reminder pop up? OMG yes…

So instead of seeing that and being like yay I did it! It was more like… I think I MIGHT have written half a page… FML.

Now, I have reset my goal to something extremely small. 2000 words a week. I can do that. It’s not too hard, its reasonable, and its attainable for someone like myself. Shit, I have already written 600 words for this one post already.

In fact, tonight I wrote about 700 words in the book. Easy right? Not really, but I still fucking did it.

This goal will allow me to make the remaining 60K words – yes I decided on 100K for the book – by September-ish. Could be more, could be less. I do like long books, so I will try for more, but I need a solid goal to work towards.

After that, I have allowed myself to November for editing. I still have a fantasy of sending it to Tor or someone and getting immediately picked up, but for now the plan is self publishing. Why? Well, I found a nifty calculator that shows how much you would make self vs traditional publishing. I make more doing self. I am money hungry, I won’t kid anyone there, but the ultimate goal for me is just to actually write this thing. The money is a plus, and it will help pay for me to be lazy… er… write…?

I really do not want the stress of a slush pile (Apparently this is another word for recycling bin according to quite a few authors) just to be rejected or wait around to be rejected for far too long. Also, an agent could just lengthen this painful process.

I dream of having an agent and a publisher. One day…

FYI a slush pile is the giant stack of submitted works that publishers or agents skim through until something catches their attention. Then, it gets put in the maybe pile.

So, I should have the book ready before Christmas this year. I will need Beta readers, I have a few in mind, but still need more. Hit me up if you are interested in reading what I have. I am still in the i-dont-give-a-shit-how-crappy-this-is-cause-its-not-in-editing-mode-yet phase. Needless to say it is a rough-rough draft.

I am a numbers person so bear with me here. If I started this goal on 2/15, and I am in need of another 60K words, that means that it will take me 30 weeks or 210 days. I am hesitant to put this here, its so final, but that would give me until 9/12 to finish. Since my magic is loosely based on astrology, that would mean it’s in the sign of Leo (Sidereal or Berg signs) and Virgo (Tropical – what most people are used to). Leo is a lion with an impenetrable hide represented by Fire, and Virgo is, among other things, based upon the last immortal to leave Earth and destined to return ushering a new age; hence being an Earth sign. I feel good about those signs. Strength and a promise to return. Good.

November can be up to 4 different signs. Since my book will be mostly based on the Berg theory, I am shooting for Ophiuchus – Nov 29 – Dec 17. Granted all of the dates are not quite fixed because of a lot of math and rotation etc. BUT, they are solid dates. I have been pussy-footing around and not setting one. (Hush all of you that realize I do not have a set date for the final draft)

It might be interesting to post my books according to the signs… Could get difficult too. Although, if I write a certain length per book, having 13 in a series, I could post one in each month. Eh… the sporadic thought process of me is quite annoying sometimes.

Ah look, I am over 1200 words now. Oh and I promise hope that the next post will have more info. Things like resources, people I am reading for publishing, the fact that I have a currently useless mailchimp account, that I am critiquing other writers works, etc.

Since I just brought it up, here is something I stumbled across a few weeks ago. It is a bit gimmicky, but still has quite a lot of great info http://timgrahl.com/ I signed up for his newsletter, and some 30 day course for free. If nothing else, he has made me really analyze how I will market when I go to publish.

Anyways, it was fun. Ya’ll come back now…