October goals

Hello everyone and welcome back to another life update. My biggest update this month actually has nothing to do with my writing projects: I secured a job for post-graduation! I sunk so much time in submitting dozens of applications, spending my afternoons interviewing over zoom, travelling to work sites, and travelling to conferences, but it’s finally paid off. The job market is hypercompetitive right now, as the US is heading into/already in a recession, and companies are slashing hiring budgets, so I needed to make sure I had an offer on the table before I could focus on anything else this year. Now that I have that security, I can drop all of that networking to focus on school and writing!

Last month, I also announced a temporary hiatus for my major writing projects. In reality, these have been on an unofficial hiatus since June because of a combination of burnout, needing distance from the stories in order to edit, and lack of time as I pursued job hunting. I still have final exams coming up, and I want to prioritize spending time with my friends in my coveted free time, but I’m calling the hiatus on Runaways off, as I’m returning to Draft 3 for NaNoWriMo. After taking such a long break from a story, having external motivation to get excited about it again can help overcome the activation energy barrier it takes to get started again. I’m hoping to finish the draft by the end of the semester so I can print off the manuscript using my school account! But that’s enough scheming – I’ll update you on that project in December. For now, let’s go over what I got done this past month, despite the hiatus.

Won by 1 point – 5/8 Goals Completed

Write short story and cross post to blog for the Inklings Challenge: If you’re unfamiliar, The Inklings Challenge is a month-long writing event for Christian authors of fantasy and science fiction, inspired by a real challenge attempted by the original Inklings writing group. For this tumblr challenge, participants were randomly sorted into one of three groups, with each assigned to a different type of speculative fiction story inspired by their namesake. I was in the Chesterton group, so I chose the prompt “Intrusive Fantasy”: Stories where the fantastical elements intrude into the real world. There was also a prompt list of seven Christian images to incorporate into the themes of our stories. If you’d like to read more about the challenge, and read the other submissions, you can find all relevant links on the tumblr blog that is hosting the challenge! If you missed my story, “To Light and To Guard” is available here.

Sort out Reedsy Discovery and update reviews on all book sites: I’ve talked about Reedsy before when listing writing resources, but if you haven’t heard of them: it’s a site full of writing and publishing advice that hosts a database of vetted professional editors, proofreaders, cover designers, and marketers so that indie authors can easily find the right person to hire when they’re preparing their book for publication, and those professionals can find easily find clients. They also have courses and webinars, an entire suite of tools that are free to use, short story competitions, and Discovery, which is a book review database similar to Goodreads. Anyone can sign up and import their library, but I’m trying to get approved as an official reviewer, which is a slow process. I also have tons of reviews to publish across Goodreads, BookBub, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Storygraph, but I ran out of time this month to write them, or read anything new.

Blog and IG scheduling: Hurrah, another month come and gone without falling off the face of the earth!

Archive FF.net PMs and reviews before it goes down: Ok, to clarify, fanfiction.net is not going down immediately. The fictonpress twitter updated after a year of radio silence, saying they plan to fix things and keep the site running, at least for now. There was a scare earlier in the month though, that the entire thing might crash and burn soon, and so a mass recovery effort was made (by other people) to back up the contents of the site so it wouldn’t be lost to the void of the internet. Fanfiction.net is unique in that there’s no way to copy/paste the contents of a story from the web, and so it must either be backed up to other sites by the author who has access to original document, or it must be typed out word by word by readers. There are also fan-binding communities who make physical hardcover copies of fanfiction, which is an incredible labor of love I’d like to learn one day. Additionally, there are tens of thousands of words in private messages and reviews that could be lost – which breaks my heart. Books can be reprinted as long as one remaining copy exists. Burning a box of letters means that correspondence can’t be retrieved ever again. I was in the midst of midterms when the information came out, and without the imminent demise of the site looming, I felt comfortable procrastinating this a little while longer while I had job applications to do. This is still high on the to-do list now that I have a little more time.

Draw gifts: I have several writer friends with birthdays in October and so I did OC illustrations for all of them!

Finish ATLA comic: This was technically a gift for my friend whose birthday was in August, but I vastly underestimated the amount of time and work that drawing a whole comic would take, and so I was determined to finish it this month. I might post this in a later post because it was a lot of work and I want to brag.

Make Vin Cosplay for Halloween: If you’re on tumblr or instagram you probably saw the reveal for this already, but there’s too much to show here, so a full “Making-of…” breakdown is coming in a later post!

Make author stickers for inventory: I spent most of my time at work sewing instead of printing stickers, but these are coming soon!

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Thanks for reading! 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!