Category: side projects (Page 1 of 5)

Ten Years Zine

January 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The way I got to this little project was via reading old newsletters from my inbox. I have a problem with not deleting emails, and also with not always reading things that I want to read. The never-ending stream of emails continues apace, and then the ones I want to read get lost in the cascade until eventually it’s been five years and I still have dozens upon dozens of unread newsletters that I really want to read.

So, the other day, I scrolled back half a decade and started catching up on old mail.

This one, from Austin Kleon, struck me as a fun challenge, so when I needed a break from grading papers, I decided to give it a go. I most definitely took more than 20 minutes to do it.

Turns out #1. I have a pretty terrible memory. I should have spent some time rereading old notebooks or at least looking at a calendar or something, because I really could not remember what happened circa 2015 or between 2018-2019. I remembered 2016 and 2017 only because I had my sons in those years.

And, of course, #2. The Year 2020.

I didn’t bother adding everything that happened that year. “COVID” and a few random words like, “Masks!” were enough to convey the memory. Because it’s all too much, and also too numb to be captured on a tiny zine page. Even now, five years later. It’s not that I particularly suffered all that much from the virus we know as “Covid-19,” (thank God, my family was lucky), but the world suffered, and since I live in the world, my world tilted as a result. I can’t even say exactly when it started tilting — maybe it was also in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 — but 2020 was when it tipped over. I fell over and flipped back up again, somehow different. Honestly, world-views were shattered. They’re still shattering. I went full-Idler.

Anyway, after the rupture of Covid, it’s like the years couldn’t contain everything that happened to me. The zine pages weren’t enough; I couldn’t fit myself in. Ink everywhere, everything at random, new memories popping up just as I thought I’d finished with the pages. No births, but some deaths, and even the biggest one, I couldn’t fit, or didn’t want to fit — it was beyond the format — and trying to catalog the rush of change and then reversion and then change and then–

I didn’t realize my decade could be divided so neatly between “ordinary” — ho-hum, having babies and raising them and work and whatever, to the point where I couldn’t recall the distinct days — and “momentous” — the rush and rumble of a boulder rolling downhill, of huge changes, bad changes, good changes, trials and errors (so many errors), (so many trials), and now I’m back where I seemingly started from in 2015: in the thick of teaching, raising my children, trying to write and publish, and wondering if I’ll ever get the hang of any of it.

But I’m definitely different. That much is true.

Which is good. One should probably change after ten years.

Ten Titles, Ten Characters (from my notebook, January 2024)

January 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I was flipping through my notebooks from 2024, mostly to see how many books I’d read in the past year (more than 40, by the way… so not bad, but now I’m thinking I want to set a challenge for myself to read over 60 this year), when I came across an entry from my January notebook that included two “Try Ten” lists.

One was ten titles, one was ten characters. Here are the lists:

Ten Titles

  1. Bicycle Repair
  2. Professor _________’s Guide to the Magically Perplexed
  3. Went Away Sailing
  4. Grandma’s Gnocchi
  5. I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream
  6. Brennivin. Shot. Cold.
  7. Stolen Goods
  8. The Voice in the Heating Vent
  9. Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat
  10. Whenever You Think of Criticizing

Ten Characters

  1. An old cop who serves evictions now
  2. The ghost of a young woman’s dead twin
  3. A boy who is in love with his best friend
  4. A foreign cleaning lady
  5. A tree that can communicate with a human
  6. An old man who stole a fellow soldier’s ID back in Vietnam
  7. The driver of a bus that takes devils in and out of Hell
  8. A middle-aged woman who once got to spend her afternoons with a unicorn but hasn’t seen one in decades
  9. An oracle/fortune teller who has lost her power
  10. A man who must take care of his sick wife in quarantine (he hasn’t seen her in a week?)

I’ll admit, that last character entry doesn’t quite make sense to me looking back at it now. Has he not seen her in a week but now can see her and must take care of her? Or has he been taking care of her in quarantine but she left him and hasn’t been seen in a week?

I really don’t know.

The funny thing is that I used one of those titles and wrote a short story to go along with it. “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream.” It was a writing challenge I did with my Creative Writing students where we had to write a short story in one hour. I participated and used this title.

The story turned out all wrong. I tried writing an unreliable narrator and it was an utter failure. Just didn’t live up to the title at all. And I tried an ironic twisty ending that was pretty stupid, frankly.

But I still like the title. I’m tempted, even now, to use the title again and write a different story. And why not?

In fact, it might be kind of funny to write several short stories, all with the same title, all different, and then put them together into a collection.

Or maybe that would be utterly not funny but just kind of stupid. I have a difficult time distinguishing between the cool and the stupid until I’ve done the thing. Before I’ve done the thing, it seems pretty cool. After I’ve done the thing, it feels pretty stupid. I have two choices, then: either keep doing the cool-sounding thing, hoping one day it won’t turn out stupid, or stop doing any of the cool-sounding things. Which means I’ll have done nothing.

I think I know which choice to make.

Better to write a dozen (or more) stupid stories than to write none at all.

Anyway, some of these ideas and characters and titles don’t sound particularly interesting at the moment, but I often wonder if these little seeds and sparks of ideas might turn out to be pretty great once put into action. It’s the action that matters. The telling of the tale. Because otherwise they’re just a list of words. I could write a dozen stories called “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream” and they would all be different. Who can say, just from that title, what stories may come?

This is why the ideas really don’t matter all that much. I can come up with ten more ideas right now. So can any of us.

It’s the weaving of the story that matters. The particular sequence of the tale is what counts.

I do wonder, though, what would happen if I combined a title from one list with a character from the other. Might be a fun game. What kind of challenge could I make for myself in this new month of a new year. From two lists in January 2024 to ten stories in January 2025…

To do that, I’d have to get over my trepidation. My worry that I’m not up to the task of writing ten stories in one month. Can I do that? Can I get over that hump, that lack of confidence?

My husband said that the word he would use to describe my 2024 was “confidence,” but I just don’t see it. I feel the opposite, like my confidence is slowly draining away. But maybe he can see something I can’t.

I hesitate to even set a challenge like ten stories in one month because what if I can’t do it? What if it stresses me out? What if I simply don’t have the time, on top of all the other duties and goals I’ve already set?

Might be fun though… the old cop serving evictions, entitled “Went Away Sailing,” and the old cop has to serve someone who never seems to be home, who might have gotten on a sailboat and drifted away, and the cop tries to find them, to serve the papers, yes, but also, just to see what it would be like to sail away from everything…

The old fortune teller who has lost her gift… every time she tries to tell a fortune and see the future, she sees her grandmother, bent over the kitchen table, rolling out potatoes and flour to make the gnocchi dough… Maybe she has to talk to her grandmother, and maybe she can’t break through, she’s lost her gift, after all…

The foreign cleaning lady hears a voice in the heating vent…

The driver of the Hell-bus… “Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat…”

(I could go on, but I’ll stop for now. The question I always have as I make up these stories and possibilities, is will my story end up being worthwhile? Will it have any meaning? Any emotion? Will readers enjoy it, or am I simply playing a word-association game with myself?)

To write ten stories in four weeks means roughly two or three stories every week. That seems like a lot, especially as I try to get NCL finished. Maybe the challenge isn’t to do it just in January, but to do a story every week? Or try to write ten stories in the first quarter? Or… I don’t know. Something.

I feel a pull toward this challenge. It’s not a coincidence that I opened my January 2024 notebook to this page with these two lists. I should ride it out. See where it goes.

I always was dissatisfied with that first “Ursula Le Guin” story. Time to try again. And the new year is the perfect time.

Dolmenwood Solo Gaming

December 24, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The best TTRPG Kickstarter from 2023 was Gavin Norman’s Dolmenwood. The whole Dolmenwood universe has been my favorite fantasy adventure gaming stuff since way back with the Wormskin zines. It’s the perfect distillation of my favorite fantastical elements–magical forests, goblins and fairies, a quasi-Medieval world that feels like an old Arthurian romance– and it’s inspired by some of my favorite fantasy art, from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to Tolkien’s “Smith of Wooten Major” to Ridley Scott’s Legend.

Dolmenwood is the gaming world designed to perfectly match my sensibilities. It’s a bit too dangerous, perhaps, to want to actually live in, but it comes awfully close. It’s an Elfland I’d love to occasionally visit, after falling asleep by a fairy mound and finding myself walking through a sun-dappled, autumnal forest.

Norman and a host of other indie game designers are doing some of the most interesting world-building in all of fantasy art and literature. In the case of Dolmenwood, Norman mixes in a lot of traditional fairy tale and folk lore elements, but the combination of whimsy and horror, of earthiness and strangeness, though drawing upon familiar iconography, ends up feeling singular and original. Maybe this is because original D&D was inspired more heavily by Sword and Sorcery fantasy and not fairy-tale fantasy, but I also think it comes down to the fact that Norman is so well-versed in the fairy tale and folk lore he draws upon, while at the same time adding original elements that feel as if they belong to those old tales.

The mysterious Drune, for instance, are (as far as I know) original to Dolmenwood (though they definitely have a druids-in-the-glade vibe, inspired perhaps by the clash between pagan and Christian believers in early medieval Europe), and the breggle, though drawing upon medieval traditions about goats and their connection to Satan, are nevertheless a novel concept, taking these medieval traditions and turning them into something new. The same could be said of the cat-fairies, the Grimalkins. Or the wood-grues. Or the mosslings.

Needless to say, I love Dolmenwood. Everything about the world, the game, and the way it makes me feel–that slightly topsy-turvy feeling of excitement and anticipation a kid feels on Christmas Eve–are why I don’t want to wait until I can set up a gaming group to play. I want to play it now. Solo-style.

I’m still making my way through the Player’s Handbook, but I’ve listened to enough 3d6 Down the Line podcast to understand the basics of game-play (and I’m pretty familiar with OSE rules too). My plan is to create a trio of PCs and have them travel to the mound in Winter’s Daughter. After that adventure, I’ll see where it goes.

I have a bunch of resources for solo gaming, though I don’t think I’ll need much for this Dolmenwood adventure. Using the module and the three core books should get me pretty far, and then a simple oracle (that can answer “yes/no” questions), and a couple of reaction and random encounter tables (that can answer “what kind?” questions) are all I need.

I have Knave 2e and Cairn and other game systems like World Without Number and Shadowdark that all have excellent random tables, so if I need to, I can use those tables for extra detail and randomness. But since I’m using the module Winter’s Daughter, I won’t necessarily need a lot of tools for building the dungeon or encounters.

And, of course, I have my notebook with the dot grid and some pens, pencils, and dice. Eventually I’ll have the Dolmenwood minis from the Kickstarter, but for now, I’ll settle for theater of the mind.

Playing solo from an adventure module might be a bit tricky because I need to read some portions of the module to understand how to proceed, but I don’t want to read too much and miss being surprised by what I find in each room. It means I have to pretend not to have certain knowledge at times so my characters can act freely, which is where I’ll rely on my oracle. Even if I, the player, know going into a certain room is bad news, I’ll let the oracle decide these things for my PCs so I don’t fudge them.

What I’m most excited about, especially as the icy winter descends upon my own town and fog is predicted in the forecast for Christmas, is the chance to embark on a journey into Dolmenwood, even if it’s a solo journey. Hopefully, after a few dice rolls and pencil scratches on my characters sheets, I’ll have three imaginary traveling companions, ready to trek into the mists and bramble of the tangled wood in search of an ancient tomb.

Goal Update: November 2024

November 25, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It’s been five months since I posted my ridiculously long list of goals, and I figured it was time to do an update. Mostly for my own reflection. Maybe this is the teacher side of me, but reflecting on my work helps me see where to go next. It’s a taking-stock process. Let’s me know what steps to take next.

I set a huge number of goals in the hopes of “failing to success,” figuring that if I kept working at a bunch of different things, I’d make more progress than if I limited myself to only a few. Does this make any sense? Who knows, but it makes sense in my own head. I tend to do better and feel better when I have lots of creative projects going on that I can toggle between and work on bit by bit. Sometimes a particular thing takes over and I obsess over it, but other times I flit back and forth like a butterfly.

So, how is my flitting these days?

Hm.

That’s the short answer. Here is the longer answer:

Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel): I am not finished but this is the goal I’ve probably made the most progress on. As of right now, I’m roughly 40k into the story (maybe 45k… not sure because I handwrote a bunch of it and am now typing it up). I’m a bit stalled, however, so I’ve decided to go back to the last moment in the story when I was still really excited and start redrafting from there. That means that my most recent three chapters will be entirely new material as I scrap the old and start again. I’m not too upset by this because it means I’m getting excited about the story again and seeing where it heads next. I’m still hopeful I can finish this before 2024 kicks it.

Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series): Haven’t done anything with this one yet. I’m focused on finishing NCL. I have a bad habit of losing steam in the middle of a novel and jumping to other things, and I don’t want that to happen with NCL, so I’m holding off on another big project until that one is finished. NCL is where my energy and imagination are at the moment too. Not that I won’t get to Ysbaddaden in 2024, but it’s probable that 2025 will be the year of Merlin’s Last Magic.

Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world: Not yet.

Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son: Not yet.

Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe: Not yet.

Publish my short story collection: Embarrassingly not yet. I have the cover art, I have the stories, I have them mostly copy edited, and now it’s just a matter of finishing layout and proofing. Getting those ISBNs assigned and uploading to markets.

Why have I stalled on this project? I think because when I have time for creative things, I tend to put my energies into writing and creating and not into the publishing. Publishing feels too much like “work,” and when I have free time, I don’t want to work, I want to play. This is good for my writing but bad (obviously) for my publishing. I should make a more concerted effort to get my writing out to readers, but in order to do so, I must steal time from my writing sessions, and I’m loathe to do that.

If there’s one goal on this list I really want to achieve before the year is out, it’s this one, so I MUST block time into my schedule and get this book out to market. I haven’t felt much urgency until now, but the pressure is starting to mount. Hopefully, I have a short story collection to announce in the coming weeks.

Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series: Not yet. Still focused on NCL and don’t want to switch to any other bigger projects.

Blog everyday (this one again!! LOL!): I am not blogging everyday… but I am trying to blog more and seeing some improvement on this measure.

Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks: Ugh. This is the one that hurts. I just haven’t been able to get into a rhythm. Since I’m really trying to finish NCL, I don’t devote much time to other writing pursuits. It should be obvious, then, that the Substack will suffer. But I hate that it’s being neglected. I don’t want to neglect it, but non-fiction takes longer (at least the kind I do on Substack), partly because it takes me longer to generate ideas and evaluate whether they’d be good enough for a newsletter essay.

I can write shorter thoughts and musings, and those tend to go on the blog, but for my Substack readers, I feel like if I’m sending something to their inboxes, it needs to be more substantial. That desire for a more in-depth and lengthy piece of writing puts the pressure on, and I shut down when there’s too much pressure. My ideas dry up. My fears and critical voice rear their heads.

The answer, such as it is, is to devote more time during my writing sessions to working on the Substack: generating ideas, drafting, researching, etc. This is a process that requires a good chunk of time. If I don’t schedule that time, it ain’t happening.

But to block time for the Substack means to lessen time for my fiction. This is the Sophie’s Choice I’m loathe to make.

Anyway, the Substack goal is a conundrum. Not sure how this is going to go other than maybe reassessing my goals and making a few hard choices.

Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends: Have played more with the kids, but not where I’d like to be. We’ve played two sessions of Hero Kids RPG, but I’m itching to play more. The kids like it, but it’s hard for me to muster the energy some evenings, so we end up not finding time to play.

I need to block time for playing into my schedule (this is a recurring theme, isn’t it?). I want to try playing solo as well, and I’m currently reading the Emirates of Ylaruam gazetteer from the old Basic D&D TSR stuff. I’m planning to use the rules for Cairn and run a little solo campaign to explore the setting and get my role-playing fix.

I’m not sure I’ll get to play more with family and friends. No one seems particularly interested; I’m by far the most enthusiastic of the group. So perhaps solo gaming is the way to go.

Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic: Not yet.

Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month: Not yet.

Make other zines: Not yet.

(Zine-making still excites me, but like with my other pursuits, I feel like all my focus should be on finishing NCL and writing fiction. If I had all the time in the world, I would do more with these side projects, but when my time is limited, I feel like I have to make the choice to write fiction. Can I find more time in my day? Can I schedule more time for these pursuits? I suppose I can, but what will be sacrificed to get this time? My walking? My reading? Time spent with my kids?

Maybe I try to fold my zine-making into time spent with my kids… we can all make zines together. This is worth a try…

Of course, I’m doing this to myself by having so many flipping goals! I realize that there’s simply not enough time in the day to do all these things to their fullest. But the seed of desire is still there, so for the moment, I’m going to continue looking for ways to do all my goals.)

Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter): Yes, a little. We are reading The Hobbit, and we’ll be starting Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone soon.

Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son): Not yet, but I’m going to try committing to doing this in the evenings. Christmas is coming up and winter too, so now is the time to get it done.

Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines): I did practice drawing cartoon owls (to turn into an Isabel-story zine…?), but that’s all. I have some drawing books for as sources, but despite identifying them around the house, I haven’t gathered them to use. As a family, we sometimes spend Saturday morning drawing, so maybe I can make that a more regular and deliberate thing.

Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year: I’ve started a long-form essay about decluttering to share with my students, but it’s in very rough draft form. I wrote a couple of models earlier this school year, but not nearly as many as I had planned. This goal sounds good in my head, but when it comes time to actually do it, I find that I resist. Just as my students resist assignments because they are assignments, I resist writing that feels like an obligation. I know I need to work on the mental attitude here and see these as fun and practice and a chance to try something new. But I’m still battling a lot of critical voice in my fiction and for-fun writing, so doing writing that’s more obligatory is an even harder hurdle to jump.

So much of writing is a mental challenge. Yes, craft matters, and learning how to do different techniques is important, but the real challenge (at least for me) is battling the ennui and the critical voice and the lack of confidence. I’m forever fighting the fear that I’ll make a mistake or write something bad.

My goal of writing more model texts for my students is no different. I’m afraid I’ll fail, so I resist doing it in the first place. After all, what if I’m trying to model a certain technique and I do a bad job of it? I’ll embarrass myself in front of my students. What if I set a goal to write a certain kind of essay and it turns out all wrong? The students will see I’m a fraud.

And on and on the negative thoughts spiral.

I know that I need to treat every creative act as an experiment, but this requires a mental shift that I’m still working on making. To see everything as an experiment means to have a certain kind of fearlessness and courage that isn’t always readily available. To be okay with failure.

This is perhaps the overarching goal for everything: to break through mental fear and go into every enterprise with an attitude of experimentation. All my 2024 goals are really the same goal, then. To experiment freely. To cease hesitating and go for it.

Bonus achievement: I wrote a short story about walking and bird-watching that came out of nowhere. It wasn’t planned, but I got excited about it and rode the wave until it was done. So despite not making progress on planned short stories, I spontaneously wrote one anyway. This is a good example of “failing to success.” I ended up writing something even though I failed to write something else. Having lots of irons in the fire, so to speak, meant that I was ready for when a new, unexpected iron needed shaping.

Draw or Make Something Every Day (in September)

September 2, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This was an idea my husband proposed today, so we’re getting a one-day-late start to the challenge, but he suggested that everyone in our household (aka me, him, and the kids) should try to make or draw something every day this month.

(If we miss a day, we can do multiple things in a day to catch up.)

I decided that I might draw some stuff for a zine I’m working on (title: “Saturday Morning”), but I might also “make” something for my various role-playing game campaigns (a solo one, a husband-and-me one, a family one, and a kids one). These somethings can include making a PC, an NPC, a map, a location, a dungeon room, a whole dungeon (!), or a treasure/magic item. I’m stealing this a bit from Dungeon23, that fabulous challenge from last year that got me started making my very first megadungeon (which, sadly, I never finished… so maybe I can work on that for my “makings” this month!).

Anyway, I like a loose definition of “making.” We have a similarly loose definition in our Creativity Club at my school. Spurred by their time in my Creative Writing class last year, the students who started the club are welcoming anyone who does any kind of creative endeavor to join, and we aren’t judgy about the kinds of things that count as “making.” We decided that even kids who want to make jam are welcome in the club! (But they should definitely share their jam with us once it’s made. :D)

My “making” for today’s family challenge was to come up with some NPCs and their backstories/personalities for the Hero Kids game I’m playing with my children. They are currently investigating the Basement O’ Rats and trying to find Roger, a local village boy. I’ve got an idea that Roger was taken by the King of Rats at the behest of a dark force that is also taking others away from Brecken Vale for mysterious reasons. This will be the central mystery of the campaign.

Does this counting as “making something”? I think it does. I took an idea, put it to paper, and developed it. I also stat-blocked Roger in case he comes with the Kids on any further adventures.

I’d say that counts for the day.

Now I just have to make something to count for yesterday…

A Ridiculous Amount of Goals (that I probably won’t achieve)

June 7, 2024 / / 2 Comments

This might be another one of those “I’m gonna blog everyday” type of promises that I make and never fulfill.

But you know what? Having an ambitious goal that I don’t achieve often turns out better than weaksauce goals or no goals at all. Why? Because even if I don’t achieve my lofty ambitions, I still achieve something, and something is better than nothing.

This is the “fail to success” model of thinking. I think this model is better for me than being all, “Not hitting my goals just makes me feel bad, man,” kind of attitude that I sometimes convince myself is true (for myself). (This whole thing should have a giant caveat that says I’m really working out my own methods and not prescribing anything to anyone.)

I also firmly believe in the “establish your practice” model too (again, for myself… but this one I do get a bit prescriptive about with my students). Establishing your artistic practice means developing habits (often daily, though not necessarily) that allow you to do your art, making it a regular part of your life.

I still think having an artistic practice is important. I’m building a life, and I want that life to include making my art. I want that life to include making my art everyday (if possible).

So yeah, establish a practice. Live it everyday if you can.

But I also think setting goals for myself — goals I often fail to achieve — helps a lot. I need to have lots of irons in the fire. No such thing as “writer’s block” only “project block” is an ethos I stand by. Learning this habit of mind has been CRUCIAL for my work as a writer. As soon as I realized that I could write anything I wanted when I sat down to write (and not just write the thing I was supposed to write), I was free. Free from thinking I was “stuck.” Free from thinking I wasn’t “in the mood.” If I have fingers to type or hands to write, and I have some paper nearby, I can write. No “block” at all. If I didn’t feel like writing the current “work in progress,” no prob. I could work on a blog post. Wasn’t feeling like that novel at the moment? No biggie, just work on a short story.

Having numerous goals is how I can stave off blockage. Having lots of writing projects, as Matthew Dicks mentions on his blog, is what gives me the freedom to keep writing.

I just finished Dicks’s Someday Is Today, which was fabulous, and in it, he encourages creators to have lots of goals and work on lots of projects, switching between them as necessary. This is often how I’ve worked in the past. Having side projects just makes sense for how my brain works.

But as I read Dicks’s book the other day, I was reminded not only to have more side projects, but that even if I don’t fully complete them all by my self-imposed deadlines, just by having the goals, I’ll accomplish more.

Take my embarrassingly unfulfilled “blog everyday” goals. On the one hand, I did not meet those goals, which means I’m a failure. But on the other hand, just by setting such a goal for myself, I blogged way more than I otherwise would have. The lofty goal propelled me to get my butt in the chair and write.

I wonder if I’m being too timid in my goals lately. Let’s say I set the goal to write a short story every week for a year. And let’s go on to say that I fail miserably at that goal. Let’s say I only manage to write three short stories that whole year.

Guess what?

That’s THREE more short stories than I had before. And if I hadn’t set the goal, I might have written none.

So what’s better? Setting no goal and getting little-to-nothing done, or setting a goal, failing at it, but writing more than I would have otherwise?

This is how to achieve things.

In such a spirit, here are all the lofty goals I want to achieve in my creative work this year. I am almost 100% certain I will not hit these goals. I am also almost 100% certain that by articulating them here on my blog, I will achieve more than I thought possible for the remainder of 2024.

My creative goals:

Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel)

Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series)

Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world

Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son

Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe

Publish my short story collection

Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series

Blog everyday (this one again!! LOL!)

Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks

Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends

Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic

Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month

Make other zines

Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter)

Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son)

Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines)

Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year

Can I meet all these goals? Maybe. Probably not. But having lofty goals means making more progress than having none. If one side project is good, then sixteen side projects is better.

I’ll try to take a page out of Dicks’s blog and post updates on my progress. I can almost guarantee that I will not meet some of these goals. But having these irons in the fire means there’s absolutely no excuse for “writer’s block.” There is ALWAYS a project I can switch to and work on when BIC time comes.

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