You Were Warned: What To Expect From Me in 2012
Hey there, good morning. On Friday, I posted a few words about setting goals, and about what it means to do that. I told you I was going to sleep on it over the weekend, and come back and tell you what I'm setting out to accomplish this year. This is the post-bullshit, scrap the New Year's Resolutions, cold-slap-of-reality version. This list looks pretty reasonable to me. You can hold me to this — if I don't live up to these by December 31st, I'll buy you a drink. Yes, you.
Get back to a better blog posting schedule. For a while there, I was doing really well with Bloodletters — I had a routine of putting together three posts over the weekend, and timing them to go live during the week. That was working out quite nicely, and like all good habits, it was really easy for me to let it slide. However I want to end up scheduling things on my end, I want to make sure I don't end up going silent for a whole month again like I did in December. "Better" is a very subjective term, and I'd have a hard time holding myself publicly accountable for that, so let's turn that into a nice, concretely quantifiable goal: Maintain an average of posting at least twice a week throughout 2012.
Post video content. So I have this spiffy high-definition digital video camera I bought back in April of last year. Since then, I've filmed a couple of my readings, and taken some behind-the-scenes footage during filming for Causality. Have I bothered to put any of this cool stuff online? No — no, I have not. In fact, I never even sat down and figured out how to get any of this footage off of my camera and onto my computer until last night. This is more than slightly ridiculous, and I need to fix that. So, let's say: Post at least half-a-dozen readings and at least one book trailer in 2012.
Do everything I can to get Causality Season One finished. Okay, see what I did there? I originally wrote, "Finish Causality Season One," and then I remembered what I said last week about goals being things you have the power to accomplish on your own, and I realized I was being a tremendous hypocrite. We have a pretty amazing team working on Causality, and I feel pretty sure we will have it done by then. But all I can promise myself is that I will try my hardest and do everything I can do.
Finish and release Still Life. This is the big one. Still Life is the novel-length continuation of the story "One Last Sunset," which appears in my collection Slices and which many people have told me is one of their favorites. If it's one of your favorites, and you've wondered what happens to Nikki Velvet after the events of that story — well, the answer to that has been sitting on my hard drive for years now. There's quite a bit of work that needs to be done on the manuscript still, but I think it's entirely doable to rewrite it, edit it, format it, and have it online in time for this year's Christmas season. (And now that I've said that in public, I'm going to sit over here in the corner and hyperventilate for a while.) I love this story too much to keep neglecting it, and I owe to Nikki to get her story out there.
Get my individual short stories up online. That's what I meant to have done in time for this Christmas season, but it fell by the wayside. I'm going to release some of the stories from my collections as stand-alone e-books, as well as several short stories that haven't seen the light of day anywhere else. Let's say I'm going to have at least twenty short stories available for sale in 2012.
Submit to at least half-a-dozen anthologies. This seems to work for me — I see a call for stories for an anthology, I get an idea from the requested theme, and it actually gets my butt in the chair to get some writing done. And if it doesn't get accepted, well, I still have a new short story. That went well last year a couple of times — one of those stories did end up in the anthology, and it will be out this month. It's a good habit and I need to keep it going.
Release another collection of short stories. Kind of a no-brainer. People do seem to like them. I like them.
Publish a new edition of Counting From Ten. By this point, the original has been out of print long enough that the rights have reverted to me. (And if my original publisher has any argument with that, he should answer my e-mails every once in a while.) I have a few copies of the original edition left, but not a lot of them. It's time to dust it off, polish it up, revise the stories in it a little, maybe add a new story or two, and definitely some bonus content, and get it back out into the world.
Actually promote things once in a while. This is another big one. I've been doing all this cool stuff, and I've been doing a lot of research about how an indie writer like myself can promote his work on the Internet, and now I need to start doing some of it. I need to come up with a more detailed marketing plan, which I'll tell you about when I've done it, but for now let's say I'm going to approach at least fifty book-bloggers and buy advertising in at least three places in 2012.
Okay. Umm, that all looks like a lot. I'd better get to work. Talk to you soon.
