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"Insanity: doing the same
thing over and over again and expecting different results."
- Albert Einstein
Umm, well pretty sure I'm not insane! I gradually
evolved away from making grand declarations of multiple goals on one specific
day of the year.
So I’m going to go with the general theme several other
Whores adopted this week and instead of resolutions, I’ll share three things I’m
going to try or try to do differently in 2014.
1. Manage my time on social media better. I LOVE twitter.
OMG. I really enjoy the conversations there, the fascinating links, the tumblr
photos, content curating, retweeting good stuff, every single thing about it. I
can spend hours engaging in all directions, without really meaning to be online
so long. I still have a day job and there are only so many productive hours
after work before I fall asleep (or have
to watch Project Runway) and only so many productive hours in the weekends so…if
my goal is to get 3 to 4 new books out in 2014, I can’t tweet AS much.
Actually, if I just stuck to vanilla tweeting, I’d probably be ok but there are
all these shiny links to follow….squirrel!
2. STOP taking on new projects that don’t relate to writing
my books. This past year I took on two things that I just couldn’t resist
and/or I was trying to be a helpful “good citizen” and WOW, stressful and a
huge drain on my fleeting free time to write. One has settled down now, thank
goodness, and is humming along smoothly with minimal stress on me, but the
other is still in flux. So I have to train myself to look before I leap and
then look again and then probably NOT volunteer for the next whatever-it-is. Being an author isn’t like the day job, where a
necessary part of managing your career progression is raising your hand to
tackle the next shiny new project. (There’s that shiny thing again!). Being an
author is…well, being an author and writing your books. Yes, there’s blogging
and being part of various author loops & groups and doing necessary promo…but
I tend to fall into these other, large things unrelated to my books.
3. So I’m not a plotter. I’m a seat-of-the-pants person all
the way. But I want to write a series. A nice, multi volume series that spans
time, involves lots of characters interacting, resolves some large plot arc
along the way…you probably see my dilemma by now. Can’t write a series if you
don’t establish a framework up front, sketch out how this person from Book Two
becomes the key to the problem in Book Four, etc etc. I don’t feel that I can write a successful series
as a pantster. The books I currently write are connected series, each set in a
distinct Universe (either ancient Egypt or the far future in a civilization
known as the Sectors) with some mildly recurring characters but overall
standalone stories. So I want to make the leap to telling a multi-volume story
about the same people. We’ll see. It’s a goal, not a resolution! I will be
content at the start of 2015 if I’ve ended up writing 3 or 4 good books, even
if they continue to be standalone stories.
And that’s me, four days into 2014 – Happy New Year!
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