Goals, and How to Hit Them

I know I've already set my New Year's resolutions, but I did want to share a tip that helps me stay focused from day to day. Before Christmas this year, I had been keeping a blank notebook and writing out my daily goals either before going to bed the night before, or before I start working in the morning. For Christmas this year, my mother in law bought me a running log that I have converted into a dual purpose log; I track my daily workouts in it along with my writing goals.

The daily goals don't always get accomplished. I have taken to circling the goals that I don't reach so I can see my shortcomings more easily. This is my way of embarrassing myself into reaching my goals the next day. Lately, my missed goals have mostly been workouts, which is not good. I try to balance my writing life with my fitness, but lately it has been tough to focus on fitness. Having three children will do that, I hear. But I am a firm believer that working out on a consistent basis will help with your writing as well. Physical health translates to mental health.

My journal never leaves my computer's side. This helps me stay focused on what I need to accomplish on a minute to minute basis. Focus is not always easy, but having my daily goals always close at hand helps a lot.

New Year's Resolutions

Inspired by Joe Konrath's blog, I have decided to put together a list of my own personal goals that I wish to accomplish in 2012. I am awful at setting goals for myself, and I hope that by writing these down for my millions of readers to see, I will be held accountable for each goal I set forth.

1. Publish Viral Empire. This is a 3 issue graphic novel that I am working on with the very talented Rainy Arealius. We have a working script in place as well as some idea of what we want the artwork to look like. There isn't much work left on my end, other than the formatting and printing, so this should be a pretty easy goal to accomplish.
2. Finish writing one novel. I have three started. Well, they used to be one novel, but now they are a trilogy, and I am not very far into any of them. Finishing one will be a major task, but I really need to do this just to prove to myself that I can start and finish a novel.
3. Read 35 books. I have read 28 books this year. 35 will be tough, but it is very possible.
4. Go to a convention. I don't care whether it's a mystery writers convention or a comic convention. I need to start networking and get my work more noticed. This will be made much easier if I can get funding through Kickstarter. I have applied and I am currently working on my final proposal. This would be a huge help to getting Viral Empire published.
5. Finally, I want to finish the short western I began a few years ago. It's not a novel, so I guess that makes it a short story or a novella. I see this as a western-thriller, complete with a serial killer and all, just set up in the wild, wild west.

I will keep you posted as far as my progress goes. This should be a very productive year, I have all the groundwork set to establish these goals, it's just a matter of focus.

Progress

The more forward progress we make on the graphic novel, the more exciting it is. We are currently working with a complete outline of the first three issues and have mockups of what the covers should look like. Rainy has begun work on the interior artwork and the ball seems to be rolling very smoothly.

Thanks to my friends at www.comicbooksnob.com, I have recently found a great resource as far as financing creative projects is concerned. It's called Kickstarter and it allows fellow artists and writers and directors/filmmakers to look over a summary of your project and decide if they want to contribute money to the completion of your project.

I am so excited to even submit my work there in the off chance that it gets accepted. We are still in the beginning stages of our project and having a resource like this could help us immensely in getting this comic series off the ground. The biggest problem with most independent artists is a lack of capital to get their work distributed. Kickstarter looks like it could be the bellows that will get these projects blazing.

I will keep everyone posted as to which direction we are thinking about going with this project, but right now Kickstarter is looking like our best option.

New Idea for My Blog

I have always been a fan of reading other authors' blogs. I am sure that a lot of you feel the same way--getting inside the head of a successful writer is often an intriguing thing simply because these minds are extremely dedicated and creative.

In this light, I have decided to interview several different authors over the next few weeks. This is exciting for me because, even as a writer myself, this is a way for me to see how other authors' minds work and it is also a great way to support independent writers. In today's world of tough competition, authors need a lot of help and effort to become a success.

But it is possible. There are many self-published authors that are extremely successful. Their tips on how to self-promote can go a long way toward making sense of the new digital book age. It's the effort put into the story today that sells copies, especially with $0.99 books available at Amazon and other self-publishing outlet. Searching for the pearls in all those oyster-books is tough. My interviews are intended to help the reader sort this glut of books out for themselves.

My first interview will be Kenneth Hoss, a mystery writer whose second book will be released in the late spring of 2012. His first book, Storm Rising, is a great read so I really look forward to taking a peek into his thoughts.

The Hardest Part

The hardest part of being a writer, for me anyway, is the self-confidence. I have published two books with an actual publishing house, and I have self-published a book with the help of a sports website I occasionally write for. I've written for dozens of websites, both professionally and as a volunteer. But I seem to always be second guessing my work. It's hard for me to sit back and say, "you know, that's a damn god piece of writing." I'm hardly ever happy with my writing as a finished product.

Self doubt can be paralyzing to a writer; I know this first hand. I am currently working on a project that I am more confident in than anything I have written before--published or not. I have a great storyline, but the problem I am now facing is this: I am beginning to think it is unoriginal.

There has been a gluttonous mass of YA science fiction coming out lately. Especially dystopian stories (think The Hunger Games knock-offs). While I love reading this genre, I was hoping to contribute something new to it, not just add another cheap imitation. I never intended to copy anything, although I do borrow elements from other stories. Nothing major. For example, I took an image from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 with his dominant wall-televisions as a future form of entertainment. This is certainly not a lynchpin of either of our stories, just a way for me to pay homage to a great. Another work that was certainly an influence in my writing was Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Mira, my main character, is an intellectual standout at ten years old and is sent to a more advanced school. Think of Ender being sent to Battle School at six years old. They are similarities, but they are not rip-offs.

At least I hope not...

I have worked too hard and put too much thought into this story for it to be unoriginal. But that's the hardest part about writing. I don't have to convince myself. I must convince the reader.

Forced Products

I read an interesting forum post this morning that editors and agents tend to stay away from joint-produced graphic narratives as they are usually a forced and contrived final product. This makes sense, but I wonder how skewed this viewpoint actually is? I am a horrible artist, and when I did do the illustrations for my own stories, I felt that they were extremely contrived.

Now, I don't want to take away from what these professionals do, but in my opinion, a good graphic narrative, novel, etc. starts with a good story. The art, of course, should not take away from that story. But for many, the art can make or break the end product. If you have a good story with a good artist backing you up, how can the product not be good? The art needs to complement the story, of course, but a quality artist can do this without problems.

So this brings me back to my original point. Good artwork is definitely a necessity, but do these professionals mean that the "forced" final product an issue with poor art or poor storytelling? If anything, I would think that a good writer, if they are not an extremely talented artist, needs to outsource this position since their own poor renditions of the characters would take away from the final product. Whether this is "forced" or not, it is an important part of putting together the best product possible.

Delicate Work

Anyone who has ever begun working on a novel knows that keeping the novel on course and alive is a very delicate balance. You need to grow the story, but you also need to make sure that it doesn't waver or falter. My thriller suddenly broke down into three separate stories. This was fine at first as it made for a very exciting read. But when the plots separate themselves too much, it just doesn't work to keep them all in the same novel. So now my thriller has been decimated. All of the 30,000 words I had written have been broken down into three different novels, none of which I have had the desire to work on since realizing that they are very separate stories.

I still think that at least two of the stories have novel potential, but after this schism, I began work on a bunch of little projects, one which, in the matter of two weeks, had become a 30,000 word manuscript itself. This was really exciting for me, it had taken months of work for my previous work in progress to get to that point. But this project soon became very clear that it was not novel material. Instead, I have decided to work on it as a graphic novel.

I have been privileged to know many great artists and I am really excited to be working with Rachel Eames on this. It's a science fiction piece, which is quite unusual for me as I typically have written fantasy when I deal with spec fiction. But this piece is extremely important to me and I am really looking forward to moving in a positive direction with this. Stay tuned for more updates.