Goals and Aspirations in Review – May 2017

I know that I say this every month, but I seriously feel as though May swept out from under me in a few short moments. I have no idea where the time keeps going on me, and it’s more than a little bit frightening for a number of reasons.

So with that pleasant thought in mind, let’s go ahead and delve into what happened throughout the month of May 2017:

---

Goal #1. WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE.
I was hoping that May would be a more fruitful month when it came to writing, but as mentioned, the month just flew away from me. It’s amazing how I can go four…five…eight..ten days in a row without writing and not even realize that it happened. I did, however, manage to have a few decent days throughout the month, and amazingly, it was all fiction aside from a single day of blog-writing. Throughout the month I managed to write a combined total of 7054 words, which isn’t my best month so far this year, but not bad, all things considered. Here’s hoping to have a better month in June, though!

Mini-Goal #1.a. Publish more erotic fairy tales.
I’m glad that I didn’t remove this mini-goal in April because I actually made some headway in May! Not only did I complete and publish a second erotic fairy tale, but I also wrote, completed, and published the first in a second series of more supernatural erotic stories. Success! None of the stories are selling particularly well, but it certainly doesn’t hurt me to have them sitting there, just waiting to be found and purchased!

Mini-Goal #1.b. Start writing blog posts again.
I’m not going to spend much time on this one because, to be perfectly blunt, I barely posted any blog posts this month, and they were basically all just sharing videos, so there’s not much to talk about.

Mini-Goal #1.c. Find ways to promote the book(s).
Still working on this one. Still taking suggestions too! This is definitely going to be the worst goal of the year, I’m thinking.

#2. Get healthier.
This is, of course, an ongoing challenge, but I don’t think I did half bad throughout the month of May. I’ve been taking a lot of baby steps. One is dedicating myself to more walking, which we’ll talk about in a moment. Another has been trying to eat better, which is a struggle, no doubt, but I’ve been doing better. I’ve been drinking a lot more water, having fruit-and-yogurt smoothies for breakfast (Jason’s even been drinking them too!) and working hard to eat smaller portions and restrict the amount of junk food I have. I regularly have bad days when I end up gorging on chocolate, but, like I said…baby steps.

Mini-Goal #2.a. Walk/run 10k 8k steps per day.
Well, would you look at this! I can actually report some modicum of success for this goal this month! No, I didn’t walk 8k steps each day throughout May, but I did manage it for 18 of the 31 days, and on top of that, I managed to do an average of 8276 steps per day! That’s the best I’ve done so far this year, so I’m pretty pleased with myself, I must say. Here’s hoping that, by the end of the year I’ll have managed to actually work my way up to 10k per day!

Mini-Goal #2.b. Take daily “me time”.
As I keep explaining, this is a difficult one to keep track of, but I would say May was probably a pretty decent month for this one. I’ve found myself getting used to spending a few minutes a day playing a phone game or watching an episode of one of the shows I love that Jason doesn’t. It’s little stuff, but it helps to keep the stress down a bit.

#3. Work on my online presence – specifically, YouTube.
Another ongoing battle, of course. It’s difficult to quantify how much or how little success I had in May because between time slipping away and my brain being a little bit fuddled this past month, well…you get it. That said, I know for a fact that my subscribers, followers, and so on  have all gone up – if only a little – in the past month, so I’m going to go ahead and say it’s going well enough. 

Mini-Goal #3.a. Learn to respond immediately.
I have a lot of ups and downs with this goal, as I’ve mentioned before, but I believe I’ve been doing a lot better. My weak point seems to be emails, because they always seem to come while I’m out and too busy to respond, but I’m getting much better with the social media stuff, and I’m learning to juggle multiple conversations at once for sure. So put one in the plus column for me!

Mini-Goal #3.b. Focus more on daily social media.
There have been hiccups, but I’m doing a lot better on this one as well. I’m much better with tweets and Facebook than Instagram and Snapchat, but I’m definitely doing a lot better, and I hope it’s helping with the media presence!

Mini-Goal #3.c. Come up with new video ideas.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha….never mind. Just…never mind.

---

So that was May! How was your month? Did you get anything accomplished? Do anything cool? Please feel free to share!

Goals and Aspirations in Review – April 2017

Is it really May already? Maybe it has something to do with getting older, or maybe my brain is just refusing to acknowledge the passage of time these days, but I really can’t believe that April is over already and I’m going into another monthly review post! o.O Ah well, let’s just jump right into it, I guess!

---

Goal #1. WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE.
The month started out okay as far as writing was concerned, although I was mostly just writing blog posts for the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. Then things got slower…and slower…and slower. And the result was 7266 words written in the month of April. Not my best month, not my worst, but mostly annoying because those words were all blogging, no fiction.

To make things even worse though, I didn’t even succeed in the A-to-Z Challenge. If you were following me throughout the month you may have noticed that I just stopped posting at some point. There were a few posts that had been pre-scheduled, but about half-way through the month I just…gave up. This was partially my lovely brand of memory loss (missed one day…then two, before noticing I’d done it), but mainly because I just couldn’t seem to find the time to sit down and write the posts. Excuses, excuses, I know, but it’s true. Lately I feel like I’m always doing 20 things at once, and yet there’s always a list of 50 more things to do. I really don’t know how I’m going to find the time to write once I actually, you know…go back to work. o_o

Mini-Goal #1.a. Publish more erotic fairy tales.
I’m starting to feel like maybe I should remove this mini-goal from the list, but then, if I leave it here at least I’ve got the monthly reminder that I’m failing to follow through on it. 😛

Mini-Goal #1.b. Start writing blog posts again.
I tested this out this past month by doing the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge, and as previously stated it didn’t actually go so well. In the past I’ve always dedicated to the challenge a month or two in advance, and planned out and scheduled the posts before April even began. This year I actually tried to do it IN April, and yeah…it just didn’t work out.

On the other hand of things, I managed to finally catch up on the backlog of sharing our YouTube videos on the blog, so I can move forward with sharing them as they’re posted and hopefully squeaking in a “real” post here and there when I’ve got something to talk about. At least, that’s the hope. Fingers crossed!

Mini-Goal #1.c. Find ways to promote the book(s).
This one is still going about as well as it has been. I did manage to snag a sweet deal on a lifetime subscription with Self-Publisher’s Showcase, so hopefully that will help net me a sale here and there, but thus far there hasn’t been much action. I sold…very few books in April, and I have to admit that that depresses me, especially since I’m having such a hard time finding other ways to promote the books, other than just spamming social media and driving everyone nuts.

#2. Get healthier.
Short answer: I have not. lol I keep consistently failing to do this daily 10-minute exercise routine (trying it again from scratch this month!), and I’m absolutely the WORST at eating properly, although that might get a little better since Jason is starting to get on board as well. More crossed fingers. @_@

Mini-Goal #2.a. Walk/run 10k 8k steps per day.
April was the best month I’ve had so far this year for this goal, although I was still a bit off. I managed to hit 8000 steps or more on 13 days, got really REALLY close to 8000 steps on maybe 5-6 other days, and then failed miserably on the remaining days. lol Overall, my average steps per day worked out to 7834, which is close enough to 8000 for me to be happy, but also far enough away for me to be all, “Dammit! DO BETTER NEXT MONTH!”

Mini-Goal #2.b. Take daily “me time”.
As always, this is hard to quantify, but for April I’d say it’s a bit of a failure. I feel like I’ve spent the entire month doing chores, housework, filming, shopping, and basically barely ever relaxing. I suppose I could admit that I’ve watched several movies with Jason throughout the month, but that’s not ME time, it’s US time, you know what I mean? I think you do.

#3. Work on my online presence – specifically, YouTube.
 I feel like this is all I do lately, and yet at the same time, I’m not doing enough. I can spend 2-3 hours sending/answering emails, responding to comments, hanging out on the social media, in a single day, and yet it feels like I’ve accomplished positively jack. I’m not sure if that’s me being paranoid, or if I really am accomplishing jack. I’ll have to let you know how I feel about it next month. 😛

Mini-Goal #3.a. Learn to respond immediately.
This mini-goal went out the window in April. I’ve been trying, I really have, but I spent a LOT of time out of the house this month, and I find it very difficult to respond to things (particularly emails) while I’m out because of the amount of thumb-typing-on-my-phone that’s required and the fact that I do the majority of the driving. So yeah, I got behind a LOT this month, but I think I’ve managed to catch up in time for a new try in May.

Mini-Goal #3.b. Focus more on daily social media.
Still working on this one, and I basically have good stretches and bad stretches. Some days I’m all over the social media, and other days I got 3-4 days without saying anything and don’t even realize what happened. I’m continuing on with making it a daily “to-do” item in my planner though, so hopefully things will slowly get better.

Mini-Goal #3.c. Come up with new video ideas.
Not even going to get into it. I’ve come up with no new ideas. Jason has had a few, but not me, because I suck. 😛

---

Have you ever noticed that my goal responses get shorter and saucier as I move down the list? It must have something do with feeling progressively worse about myself as I realize how little I’ve done. -_- ANYWAY…how was your April? Did you accomplish more than me? I’d be willing to wager that you did. 🙂

“W” is for “Writer” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

This fact should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, unless you’re just showing up here today for the first time, so I won’t take up too much of your time with this particular post.

I am a writer. I’ve loved writing since I first started coming up with stories in around the third grade. The first time I ever remember writing fiction was for a class project, and I remember it clear as day: I wrote a story called “The Mystery of the Emerald-Eyed Cat”, and signed it “Tracey Lynn Marie Clarke”, even though “Marie” is not part of my name, because I was going through a weird phase. I drew emerald eyes for the cover and pasted it to green paper, and bound it together with green yarn. I was extremely proud of it, and my teacher gave me perfect marks for it.

After that I loved writing stories, and I used to come up with tons of them involving myself and my friends. Eventually I started writing fan fiction, and after that I began coming up with original characters and more intricate plots. I didn’t always write, growing up, but I always came back to writing, one way or another. I always knew that, no matter what else I did with my life, I would also be a writer. That all came together and felt real on the day I self-published my first novel, “Nowhere to Hide“, and recently I published my second novel, the first part in a series, “The Other World: Book One“.

That’s all that really needs to be said about that. It’s a key component of my self, my personality, and my past and future. I’m a writer. Period.

---

Did you know that I was a writer? Do you even care? 😀 Feel free to leave a comment!

“U” is for “Uber-Nerd” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

Yeah yeah, okay, this is kinda cheating, but screw you guys! “U” is a hard letter, and I really was an “uber” nerd all through school!

For those of you who might not know, “uber” is added to another descriptor to imply “excess” or something that “exceeds usual limits”. And in reference to being a nerd back in school, that totally applies to me.

I was the very definition of a nerd pretty much straight through from kindergarten to 12th grade. I was the kid who always knew the answer, the kid who read ten times as many books as any other in the class and actually enjoyed writing book reports, and the kid who did so well on every test and assignment that it was actually a shock if I got less than a perfect mark. I’m not bragging or anything – in fact, I’ll readily admit that I was sorely lacking in other fields, such as athleticism – but I was absolutely the star pupil for many years. Moving through into the teenage years I definitely allowed myself to slip a bit, but right up to high school graduation I was well-known for being one of those kids who had an average in the high 90’s and was genuinely loved by every teacher.

That changed sometime during college when it seemed like my brain just suddenly decided that it was done absorbing anything, but for the first thirteen years of my educational career one would definitely not have been amiss to refer to me as an “uber-nerd”.

---

Were you a nerd in school? Or were you the kind of kid who made fun of kids like me? Feel free to leave a comment!

“T” is for “Tracey’s Basement” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

No one who comes to this blog even a little bit casually could have possibly missed this fact, but for those of you who might be stumbling in because of the blogging challenge: I’m a YouTuber!

I began my YouTube channel in the summer of 2014, and it began as a pure unboxing channel. Before then I hadn’t even known unboxings were a thing – in fact, I hadn’t even known subscription boxes were a thing – but after watching a few other people doing I thought, “I could do that!” I placed orders for a couple of nerdy subscription services and a couple of girly ones as well, and started unboxing. Those first videos were…not great. But I got better, bit by bit, and talking to the camera slowly began to help me calm my anxiety flare-ups as well.

Eventually my husband, Jason, began helping out on the channel by putting together a “studio” for me, creating an opening for the videos, making nicer thumbnails, working on branding, and other such things, and it really began to blossom from there. Jason started joining me in videos, we started focusing more on quality, and the channel became what it is today: “Tracey’s Basement” featuring Tracey and Jason (and sometimes the little one as well). It took me about a year and a half to get my first thousand subscribers, but once Jason took over quality control and we got into a groove, that number tripled in less than the following year.

These days Jason and I still do unboxing videos, but we also do toy hauls and mail calls (whenever awesome, awesome people send us things), and whatever random geekiness comes across our desks, such as the My Life in Movies TAG we were tagged in not too long ago. So basically, what I’m getting at, is that if you’re a geek, or if you just love collectibles and/or subscription boxes, come check us out over at “Tracey’s Basement“!

“O” is for “Other World: Book One” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

More self promotion today!

“The Other World: Book One” is my recently-published novel that is the first book in a series. It is the story of a teenage girl who has lost everything but subsequently gains a strange and unusual purpose when she is transported into a parallel universe.

This story, like my previous novel “Nowhere to Hide”, was a National Novel Writing Month project, but that’s not where it started. The original story, which I then called “Parallels”, was a single novel that I began writing after my high school sweetheart broke up with me. I was a complete mess – as one tends to be after a break-up – and one of the things I did as a result of that was to get back into writing for cathartic reasons. It was a Mary-Sue project at first, because I was writing simply to make myself feel better. The main character was based on myself, and the bad guy was based on the dude who broke up with me, and that’s really all you need to know, because no trace of that original story made it to the final cut. Those first chapters that I wrote way back then were picked up a few years later and re-written twice before being dropped again. The following year I picked it up again as my NaNovel, and a few years later I picked it up AGAIN as my NaNovel. A couple of years after that I had the idea to change the single story into a short series, and after about two years of working on it I finally came out with Book One.

The final cut (or, at least, the final cut of Book One, I suppose) is not even the tiniest bit like the original draft. As the years went on my views on life changed, my views on what is good literature changed, my skills as a writer grew, and all in all the story just evolved, became much, much better, and turned into something completely different. That’s a good thing, but in a way also very weird from my perspective, because I can remember all the bits of story that never made it in, the things that I realized were stupid, or literary suicide, or just didn’t fit anymore as the characters changed entirely.

But I’m mostly rambling. The point is that the story that was is just a memory now, and the story that is is all the better for it. So if you’d like to check it out and support your local indie author, please click on the image or link above for both the ebook and paperback options. 🙂

---

Are you going to check out The Other World: Book One? It’s okay, you can be honest with me! XD Leave a comment as well, if you’d like!

“N” is for “Nowhere to Hide” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

Time for some self-promotion! 😀

“Nowhere to Hide” is the first book that I completed fully, revised, edited, and published. In those early days I even designed my own cover for it, although I later hired a professional cover artist to create a more attractive one. It’s the story of a girl named Nancy and the people she encounters as the world falls apart during a zombie outbreak. But the zombies aren’t the only monsters in this world…dum dum duuuuuuuuuuum. 🙂

This zombie apocalypse story began life after I read Stephen King’s “Cell”, which I loved. After reading it – and having recently watched several zombie-related movies as well – I thought to myself, “I could do this”, and since National Novel Writing Month was just around the corner, I planned to write my first ever zombie story. It was tons of fun, but also posed it’s challenges as well. I struggled with deciding how to handle gore (too much, too little, too graphic), what kind of endgame I wanted the story to progress toward, and for the first time I really had to pay attention to things like the timeline so that I wouldn’t lose track of basic logic (for instance, a broken bone couldn’t heal in a 2-day time-span). By the time I had a completed first draft I also had a brain filled to the brim with doubts. As many authors before me have done, I tossed the story aside, confident that it was complete and utter drivel.

Luckily, I did convince myself to go back to it, and with the help of my beta-reader I was able to fix up the manuscript and convince myself that it was, in fact, actually a good story . It went through several rounds of edits and revisions, but eventually I actually managed to sit back, look at it, and think, “This is good! People will like this!” And so it was off to CreateSpace.com I went.

Some people have asked me why I didn’t attempt to traditionally publish, and believe me, I did think about it. However, in the end I decided that I was better off going the indie route. By the time my manuscript was ready interest in zombies had begun to wane, and querying traditional publishers can be a very long and arduous journey. I didn’t want to risk the time it would require, because by the time a publisher was willing to take a chance on me, it would be entirely possible that zombies had gone completely out of the limelight and no one would be interested in the book.

Was that choice for the best? I don’t know. Selling books as an indie author is extremely difficult, so maybe I would have been better off going traditional after all. Then again, if I’d attempted the traditional route I might still be querying, with no acceptance letter in sight.

In the end, I’m glad that I did things the way that I did because what’s most important to me is that the book is out there, ready and available for people to read. Of course, it would also be nice if people were actually buying and reading it, so here’s my puppy-dog-eyed plea: check it out! You never know, you might absolutely love it!

---

Have you checked out “Nowhere to Hide” yet? Let me know in the comments below!

“L” is for “Losing Sleep” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

I know the way this one sounds, but it’s actually not going to be about anxiety or stress or anything like that (although they may play a part, depending on how you look at it).

I lose a great deal of sleep on a regular basis, and it’s all because my brain evidently refuses to switch off. Now, I have no problems actually falling asleep. Unlike my husband – who needs something like a TV show to distract his brain so he can just zone out and eventually fall asleep – I can go from fully awake to out cold in just a few short minutes. Falling asleep has never been my problem.

My problem is the dreams. 

Now, I’ve never had a sleep study or anything like that done, so I can’t rightly say that the dreams themselves are the problems, or if they’re just a symptom of my body refusing to sleep properly, but one thing is clear, and that’s the fact that I spend a very large amount of time in REM sleep. I’ve complained for years that I spend all night every night dreaming, and subsequently had people scoff and inform me (as though I’d never heard this information before) that we only actually dream in the few minutes that we spend in REM sleep, but what I’ve learned through specialized devices and apps that monitor your sleep, that “few minutes” for me is more like “a third of the night”.

I have blockbuster full-length motion picture dreams, you guys, and I’m not even exaggerating. My dreams feature a huge number of characters, intricate plots, and a flurry of emotions. They are extremely detailed and extremely vivid. I’ve written down dreams that took a dozen pages to fully explain, and I’ve woken up from dreams absolutely devastated by the events that unfurled because I was absolutely convinced they’d actually happened. I’ve had dreams that made me feel like weeks passed in the time I spent asleep, and I’ve had dreams that absolutely exhausted me, both emotionally and physically, to the point that I’d swear I never slept at all.

The best part, however, is that there’s basically nothing I, or anyone else can do about it. Sleeping pills are a common suggestion, but those drugs are specifically designed to put you to sleep. They do very little to actually keep you asleep, which is where my problem lies. I drift in and out of my sleep cycle, spending more time in the “practically awake” phase than in the “deep asleep” phase, and I’ve been told flat out that there is nothing currently available that addresses that particular issue. So I guess, for the foreseeable future I just continue to lose sleep on a regular basis.

At least the dreams are good writing fodder. 🙂

---

How do you sleep? Any troubles at all? Any outrageous dreams? Feel free to leave a comment!

“K” is for “Kicks to the Head” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

Those who know me these days would be hard-pressed to believe that I was ever involved in any kind of sport, but I did actually go through a period of a few years during which I was quite involved in Tae Kwon Do. I got into it when my boyfriend of the time did, and I ended up enjoying it a heck of a lot more than I expected to. I wasn’t confident at first, because I’ve never been good at anything even the littlest bit athletic, but one thing that I have always had is a decent amount of strength in my legs, and that played into Tae Kwon Do very nicely.

The repetition of practicing  kicks was both soothing, as well as being an excellent workout. I loved doing my forms, and although I wasn’t a fan of the jogging at the beginning of every class, I actually rather enjoyed sparring with my classmates.

Sparring wasn’t the best though. Contrary to the fact that I wasn’t a huge fan of being the center of attention back then, I really enjoyed going to competitions and fighting all out. There was something extremely cathartic about really genuinely fighting someone with all my might. That said, it was a bit of a double-edged sword, because as I was trying to kick my opponent as hard as I could, so she was trying to kick me as hard as she could. And as I was never the greatest at dodging, the result of these fights was usually more than a few kicks straight to the head.

Upon further thought…that may have been around the time that I found my brain decided to stop working properly. There’s something to think on. :3

---

Did you ever participate in any kind of sports? Did you enjoy them? Feel free to comment!

“J” is for “Jason” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

---

Is it cheating to talk about my husband when my theme is to talk about myself? Well TOO BAD! 😀

Jason and I first met in high school when I decided to crash my best friend’s science class one period. She sat in the back corner, and there were no seats around her, so I literally sat on the floor next to her the entire class. Jason happened to sit next to her as well, and for a while after that I was referred to as “Kelly’s weird friend who sits on the floor”. Simultaneously, I incorporated Jason into a ridiculous story my friend and I were co-writing for fun, because as a goofy geeky guy who was really into Powerpuff Girls at the time, he seemed like an excellent comedy relief.

Eventually we started hanging out more because – DRAMA! (j/k) – I was dating one of his best friends. We went to lots of the same parties, went to movies/bowling/shopping/etc in groups, and so on, and to be perfectly honest…we didn’t really like each other that much. Mainly it was teenage stupidity; I was the chick who was dragging his buddy down, and he was the guy who was always around when I wanted to be alone with my boyfriend.

In the second year of college, my boyfriend broke up with me and headed all the way to Sweden to do a term there for school. Around the same time Jason decided to leave the program he’d been in at his university and moved home. As a result, we started hanging out together a lot more, with the other few mutual friends we had who were going to the local university. When faced more with each other on a more personal level, it eventually began to become clear that Jason and I actually had a fair bit in common, and were a lot more suited to each other than my previous boyfriend and I had been. Then, one day, he asked me out, and the rest, as they say, is pretty much history.

We’ve been together now for nearly 15 years. We have a house, a beautiful daughter, we co-host our YouTube channel, and we spend our days enjoying each other’s geekiness. Don’t get me wrong – sometimes we fight like cats and dogs – but it’s definitely love. No two people who weren’t in love could have put up with each other’s foolishness the way we two have. XD

---

Do you have a significant other? If so, how did you meet? Feel free to leave a comment!