I wanted to tell an animal joke but its irrelephant.
Hello, all!
I got tired of how I’d been doing the newsletter (and depressed about how bad I am at Patreon), so I’m trying something different.
I got jealous of someone else’s newsletter, which was much simpler-looking than mine, and suddenly realized that the new format might work for Patreon posts. I still have a long way to go to try to sort out what I want to do on Patreon, and how I might be able to use it to grow my business as a writer, but it’s a start.
Note: I don’t have any new releases planned for January!
I think everyone has their own personal little deadly sin, and mine is Envy. I try not to let it simmer too much, but to goad me into going after what I want, rather than telling myself that staying in a rut is fine.
The plan is:
- One article.
- Best book of the previous month.
- Links to new stuff.
Ugh, it hurts to write that. I want to do All the Things. But when you don’t set any actual priorities, then All the Things just becomes an accumulation of All the Easiest Things, you run out of time, and you don’t get where you want to go.
More on that below.
Priorities
If you’re struggling with your New Year’s resolutions, read on.
I decided to stop making New Year’s resolutions. You know how it goes. First you push hard. Then you slide a little. You push even harder. Then you slide a little further. Eventually, all that pushing makes you tired. And you stop.
Last year, I decided that I wanted to move from a freelance-based business (ghostwriting for clients) to a royalty-based business (selling my own books). I knew it was going to take a lot of time. I started blocking off mornings for my own work, and afternoons for my clients. And then I spun my wheels. I was doing a lot of minor tasks that didn’t get me any further toward my goal.
So, knowing myself, I decided to do one small task per day from several categories:
- Writing for myself.
- Studying.
- Promoting my work.
- Publishing more work.
By November I realized I was missing one category:
- Growing my business.
I had run into a situation where I had to do a massive behind-the-scenes overhaul on my website. I had let things slide…and it had become frustrating to use. You can’t grow business based on a website that annoys people. But I hate updating my website. Bleah.
When I sat back during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I realized that having those categories was nice, but that I wasn’t really accomplishing what I had set out to do. Publishing my backlog of work, in particular, hadn’t really gone anywhere.
My priorities had defaulted to:
- Promoting (if you include social media).
- Writing.
- Studying.
- Publishing.
- Growing my business.
Ouch! I was spending the majority of my time keeping up with stupid Facebook notifications. I was jumping whenever someone whistled.
I went over the last ten years of my writing career. I’m not where I used to be. I’m a much better writer. I looked at the things that made me better. The top thing wasn’t writing, per se. It was studying. Specifically, it was about five years ago that I started typing stories in an doing analysis on how specific parts of them worked.
Studying how to write in an effective manner (typing stuff in) helped me write faster, edit less, and feel more confident about what I wrote. It was a game changer. I can type stuff in if I’m depressed, anxious, or brain-dead that morning, and it will help me focus on writing. And, if I stick to typing in a thousand words a day, it doesn’t really take that long.
But it was embarrassing to realize that writing wasn’t the top item. Also embarrassing? Realizing just how much backlog I had in my files, waiting to get edited and published. Write as much as you want, but by itself it can’t make your career.
I sat down over a few days and painfully sorted out what would put me where I wanted to be, eventually:
- Studying.
- Writing.
- Publishing.
- Growing my business.
- Promotions.
(I put publishing over growing my business right now because I have literally ten different things that I should have published years ago, so right now that kind of is growing the business.)
A lot of things are important. But when you say to yourself, “I can get it all done!” then something is going to slide, and it’s going to be the hardest, most brain-intense, most life-enriching items on your to-do list, unless you have priorities. No priorities = Facebook.
I’ve been using the new list since January 2, and I’ve already had two super-productive days, and one day of running errands. I honestly feel a little panicked, because I’m not jumping on top of my emails and messages first thing in the morning, and it’s easy to convince yourself the world will end if you don’t reply to people immediately if not sooner. But I got a lot of stuff done.
We’ll see how it goes. If you try something similar, please be gentle on yourself: getting myself sorted even this far took about half a year and involved a lot of mistakes.
But I think in ten years I’m going to be pretty pleased.
Best Book of December
The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. A graphic novel that I received from my wonderful spouse for Christmas. It’s nearly wordless: the only words are written in an unintelligible alien tongue. The delicate art depicts a foreign world after a man leaves his home to find better opportunities elsewhere. This is a love letter to learning a new world, where it pinches, and where you can find help. Brought tears to my eyes. Recommend for anyone needing an uplift.
New Stuff
Amazing Monster Tales: Dawn of the Monsters, containing my story “The Grave-Diggers,” is out now! 11 tales of monsters, mayhem, strange and inexplicable events, uncanny technologies, wildly improbable events, and more. Some monsters you’ve seen before…
And some of them you haven’t!
Some monsters are the good guys…
And some of them are very, very bad indeed!