Monday May 21st #writemotivation Check-In

Like I said in my Sunday Links post, the month has flown by for me. There's been a ton of great writing news, which is awesome, though I feel like I've been running short of time to do a lot of new writing work in the last several days. I did do critiques on about 20,000 words of fiction not too long ago and both of the people that I sent notes back to seemed to find them useful. So, that's been good. But since finishing a new story last Monday I've only made a small amount of progress on one of my ongoing fiction projects. I've still been writing every day, one way or the other, but I'm beginning to get a slightly "itchy" feeling about not having made much headway on fiction for almost a week.

And, on the whole, I feel like that's a good thing. It certainly could be a bad thing if I was letting it turn into negative self-talk or otherwise letting it get me down. But I think of it the same way that I hear some people talk about feeling antsy if they haven't exercised recently. It means that my brain is expecting me to be doing this thing and is reminding me that I really should spend some time on it soon! And since this "thing" is something that I really, really want to continue to make progress on, I'm not going to complain about that.

I'm going to do one thing, though, to give myself a bit of an extra nudge. I've already well surpassed my monthly fiction writing goal (as I'll discuss further below) but I want to take the last 1/3rd of May and aim to add an additional 1/3rd to my goal word count. So another 2500 words of fiction for May for me. There's no reason this should be hard, but it will be another little carrot out there to keep striving towards.

With this being Monday, it's time to update my goal status for the month for #writemotivation. Next Monday (or thereabouts) I'll have a final wrap-up for the month and also define my June goals.

1) Except for a Memorial Day Weekend blogging hiatus, keep all my writing routines -- Daily Writing Chain (aka Seinfeld Chain), blogging schedule, etc. - This has been going just fine. There've been some days recently when I've done close to the minimum 500 words for my Daily Writing Chain, but that's why I keep the number at that (relatively) easy target. The days I need to be able to have lots of time for other things, I do.

2) Write and submit one or more short stories for the first time. - I've completed two new stories this month, though neither has been submitted yet. There's a slim chance, I suppose, that I'll miss the "submit" portion of this goal as both the two I've completed are off with beta readers. If that happens, it happens, though I'll certainly keep the goal in mind as I plan the rest of my work for the month.

3) Make revisions to my non-fiction project based on feedback and my own editing of it. - I received feedback on this but haven't started on revisions yet.

4) Write 7,500 words of new fiction. - Even with several days recently with little or no fiction writing I'm at 8,563 for the month. If I meet my "bonus" goal above of another 2,500 words I'll be over 11,000 for the month.

5) On 5/31, have two non-time-sensitive blog posts written and ready for future use on a day when I'm not able to post something "new." - This one should be fine, unless I have to use one of my two reserved items for 5/31 itself.

6) Launch at least one new eBook - Earlier this week, I thought it was a bit less likely that I'd do one this month. However, there's a short story that's a reasonable length for a standalone $0.99 short which might be a good candidate for ePublication. It's a mystery/crime story which, on the one hand, means that it doesn't "fit" with my first ePub in terms of being a natural followup in the same genre. On the other hand, that means there's a dearth of good short fiction markets for it. I like this story quite a bit but couldn't find anywhere that I'd want to send it. I'm going to sleep on it for a day or two more, but I might go ahead and... if you'll pardon the saying... pull the trigger on making this one my May eBook.

Finally, an additional piece of news. As you may have seen, I've had an absolutely phenomenal run of sales recently to various publications. This news isn't a "sale" per se since no money is involved, but the one and only micro-fiction (Twitter-length story) in my inventory has been accepted by trapeze magazine and will be run on their site in the near future. I generally don't submit to non-paying venues but there are only a handful of paying venues for micro-fiction. Trapeze is run by Stephen Ramey, and I'm glad that he wanted to publish it on the site. As always, I'll let everyone know when it's available to read.

#writemotivation folks and others, have a fantastic week and be sure to be safe if you're traveling over Memorial Day weekend!