Monday July 9th #writemotivation Update

First off, I have publication dates to announce for two of my short stories. Nature will be running "An Unsuitable Job for a Human" in their July 12, 2012 issue. It should be available to read on-line beginning in the late-afternoon of the 11th for readers in North America. Also, Every Day Fiction will be running "Present Company" on July 24th. I'll post links as soon as these are available for reading.

July being a #writemotivation month, I'm going to be posting status update on my goals for the month every Monday. Before I get to that though, I wanted to mention a new wrinkle I'm adding to my Daily Writing Chain. My current goals are to write 500 words every day (which can take the form of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, blog post writing, and/or critiques for other writers) or spend 45 minutes on intensive revisions.

Well, I've gotten massively behind on my fiction submissions/re-submissions. Enough so that it's going to take me an hour or two some day to get stories that are ready for submission out to market.

Now I don't normally want to include time spent submitting stories as "writing" time for my Chain. But it seems that every once in a while I might have a "Special Project" of some kind that's truly writing-related but that doesn't fit my existing criteria.

So I'm going to try letting myself have one "Special Project" day per month for my Chain. I have to spend at least an hour of serious, focused work on that project and it has to be something that genuinely helps move my writing career forward. I'm going to give that a try this month (with a day in the very near future where I blast through a bunch of submissions as my July "Special Project") and keep it as an option for now. If it starts to turn into a nuisance, I'll get rid of it. But I think it will prove a valuable option which, at once a month, shouldn't really decrease my overall output in any notable way.

As always, I'll let everyone know how this goes and whether it is something that I think is useful as an option for people or if it's something that I think poses challenges or risks I haven't considered so far.

So, with that in mind, let's go on to the #writemotivation July progress report below the jump!


Here are my July goals:

1) Keep all my writing routines -- Daily Writing Chain, blogging schedule, etc. - Chugging along on target with this.

2) Write at least one new story. - Done. In kind of a massive way. I've written four new stories so far this month. They're all short, but I think that there's some quality there, too.

3) Submit at least four stories for the first time. - I'm at one, so far, for the month. So that's on-target-ish. I'm a bit bummed that my revision day last week fell through. I'm going to see if I can fit it in sometime later this month or early next month.

4) Write 7,500 words of new fiction. - Very much on target.

5) On 7/31, 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." - Not at all on target. In fact, I've gone from having one spare to having zero spare.

6) Launch at least one new eBook. - We'll see how this goes. The project I thought would be my July release is not as far along as it probably should be for me to be planning on it getting out in the next three weeks. I might choose to pass on this for the month, depending on how everything pans out over the next week or two. So far, generally speaking, I would say that my eBook experiences have been good for learning but not so good for reaching readers and producing income. I wouldn't say I'm "disappointed" as I've gone in with rather low expectations, but I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised and that hasn't been the case so far. Still, I feel like having experimented with the tools needed to do this is good and I do plan to continue to release eBooks most months the remainder of the year but if I skip a month or do something like release none in July but two in August, I'm not going to consider that a huge step back in my overall progress.