With a new year comes the seemingly mandatory New Year’s resolutions. Be as cynical as you may, the start of a brand-new calendar year is a logical time to implement a new goal, set up a road map for what you want to do, and overall get your life in a better direction than where you think it is right now. A lot of people do take a negative stance on resolutions – you even have the snide term of “Resolutioners” used to describe those who will fill up gyms across the world in an effort to make themselves live healthier lives. And it is so easy to look negatively at Resolutioners, whether they be in the gym or elsewhere, and think negatively.
But if you have read any of my blogs, odds are you know that I try and take as much negativity as I can out of my life. So why don’t we take a second to think positively about the new resolutions that I am sure we all have.
A New Blogging Schedule
First and foremost, you may have noticed that this blog is going up on a Tuesday. Now, before you curse me to the internet and blog gods for being late, this is intentional. Going forward, at least for the next few months, I will be operating on a Tuesday and Thursday schedule for blogs, with the occasional bonus entry on Saturday. This bonus content would be similar to what has occasionally been released on Fridays, previously: short stories, Coffeehouse interviews, reviews, excerpts, etc.
There are a few reasons for this. The first is from a pseudo-marketing standpoint. I know, more or less, what my average audience and the visibility of my posts are from the last five months of posting on the same schedule. While this changes as the blog grows, I want to see what it will be like if I post on different dates. Specifically, I want to see if posting on a Saturday is better or worse than posting on a Friday. The weekend can be quite a different beast!
Additionally, posting only two blogs a week coincides with my own resolution. I started this blog with the intention of advancing my novel and creative writing skills. I wanted to share my work, progress towards indie authorship, and I have ended up interacting with people I never could have met without this experience. Over the last five months I have absolutely loved working on this blog.
That being said, it has been a lot more work than I thought it would be. Writing three blogs a week and trying to maintain and grow a social media presence (which I still would like to become more consistent with) is very time consuming. It has taken away a lot of the time that I previously used to write, and the result has been tangible. I set up this medium to improve myself and Archangel, and there has simply been no time for the latter. Almost as bad, we have had to miss more than a few Dungeons & Dragons sessions in the last few months because I have been too busy.
Life is all about finding a balance, and this is my attempt to find just that.
Working on the Novel
So, since I have set aside some time, it means that I will be putting a lot more effort into Archangel. Not that I was not putting my heart and soul into it before! I was just putting it in pieces at a time, with a lot of space in between. So, my resolution is to change that.
Since I decided to split Archangel up into two books, the sheer amount of work ahead of me has made it easy to procrastinate. But if I really am going to preach about pursuing your passion and making it real, I must be willing to put that work in. So, I am cracking down on my time management skills and treating this endeavour as a commitment, not a passing hobby.
This extends to short stories as well. I have been periodically going back to the same two stories for over a month now, always finding some way to put off the work that I know I should be doing. It is work that I love to do! So hopefully a little exercise in time management will help.
Anything Else?
Well, my internship comes to an end in just over two weeks. A lot of my time is spent looking and applying for jobs. It is a major source of stress and I think that same stress is negatively impacting a lot of the things mentioned here. I said before that the new year was a good time to make resolutions, but a major life event, like a new job, is as well. So expect to see some sort of an update after January 20th.
But in the meantime, I am also getting a new campaign going with the D&D adventurers, I am working on my own fledgling tabletop RPG (more to come on that in a bit. Fledgling might even be generous at this point), and am dealing with the general struggles of a twenty-three-year-old. All while Netflix continues to release shows and movies, which is hardly fair of them.
Comment down below if you have any resolutions you would like to pursue this year. If you help keep me accountable, I promise I will do my best to do the same. See you on Thursday.