June Goals

Well, we’re halfway through the year and it’s been a great six months of beating writers block and burnout back into the hell from whence they came with a very big stick. I tried to take some time off this month to rest, work on low-stakes side projects, and enjoy long chill chats with friends instead of constantly working, and I think it’s helped a lot. I’m still exhausted, but in a satisfied, “I’ve spent my time well” sort of way, and not the frantic “I’m running out of time” that I’m used to. I’m settled down at my internship, living alone for the first time in my life, and learning how to manage my free time like an actual adult. Weird stuff. Let’s see what I did with my first month of summer “break”!

Won by 2 – 7/10 Goals Completed

Renew blog subscription and update – donation links, SEO, new theme redesign, research anchor podcasts: The website subscription was up for renewal in July so I wanted to get a head start on it and do my research. I’ve had this blog for 2 years, and it takes up about as much time as a part-time job to maintain. With my publishing endeavors turning more serious as I finished the first round of beta readers for Runaways, I wanted to make this site more professional, and monetize it to help offset the cost of publication and maintenance. You’ll already notice the new theme, which is a vast improvement to the boring text-based basic one I had before. I set up a few systems with WordPress tools to help the site load faster and more securely to avoid scammers in the comments, and help it show up in search results. You may also notice there are now ads and donation links. I tried to set these up to be as unobtrusive as possible, and no one is under any obligation to throw money at me, but the avenues now exist in case someone feels like being a ~patron of the arts~. I decided not to work on podcast versions of my posts for now, simply because I need to focus on my actual writing, but now I know how it works if I ever want to do that in the future. All in all, exciting updates!

Make graphics for Pinterest: There’s over 80 new shinies, all tricked out with links and descriptions! Check them out here, and you can peruse my boards to see what inspired each story!

Finish Mistborn era 1 (and a bunch of The Magnus Archives): My job this summer thankfully involves a lot of tedious and repetitive manual labor in a quiet lab, which means I can listen to media for several hours a day. I’ve burned through the first 105 episodes of TMA on a re-listen, as well as The Hero of Ages. Slowly but surely catching up on that goodreads goal haha.

Write story for mailing list: This took longer than I hoped it to because halfway through the draft, I decided the story would work better as a script, scrapped the whole thing, and started over from scratch. But it’s done and out! If you missed the newsletter, you can still read “Edge of Infinity” by signing up for the mailing list now, and in the next installment, hopefully I’ll have the audio drama produced to go with it!

Get a tablet and start learning digital art: This has been a long-awaited wish of mine, and I finally jumped on a good deal earlier this month. It’s so satisfying to finally be able to render the glowy magic effects that my traditional art lacks. I still love my pencils, pens, and markers, so that won’t be going anywhere, but I am excited to illustrate some more scenes.

Blog and IG scheduling: It was close this month, but I finished every week! Be sure to check out my summer celebration and giveaway if you haven’t yet!

Transcribe Runaways comments and highlighter: Last month, I was able to aggregate all the comments my beta readers made through Google Docs by downloading them to Microsoft Word and then combining the various documents. This was most of the feedback, but two of my beta readers included handwritten comments and highlight as a prose style code, respectively. These couldn’t migrate the same way, so I had to manually transcribe all of them into my aggregate document in order to get started on the edit. This was more tedious than I expected, but now it’s done and the revisions are ready to go!

Edit through Part 2 of Runaways: I ran out of time to finish this, because the website stuff, mailing list story, and transcription took SO long, but I’m ready to go for July Camp NaNoWriMo!

Edit one chapter in Storge: I also completely ran out of time for this goal, however this WIP was not far from my mind as I tried to…

Figure out going into the second half of the book what I’m doing with the Staff in Laoche: This is half-done. I’ve done a LOT of brainstorming, but it’s not completely sorted out yet. The more I pull at the old plot threads, the faster the web unravels, and I’ve got quite the task in front of me of reconstructing it again. But the conspiracy board serves me well, and we’re getting closer to some answers!

Thanks for reading! Do you have any fun plans for the summer? What are you working on this month? I want this blog to be more than me shouting into the void. If I can use this platform to help boost other creators, I’d love to see your work too. If you want to have your recommendations and/or your own writing featured in a Resource Rec post, or if you want to collaborate with me, you can leave a comment below for both, or contact me on either tumblr or IG! If you feel so generously inclined, you can support my writing by leaving me a tip on my Kofi or donating using the secure box below. Until next time, thanks for reading and happy writing!