The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 35,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
I’m gonna admit something here…I have no idea where the past week went. It just kinda…disappeared on me. I spent the rest of last Wednesday tidying up and washing bedsheets, so that I could spend all day Thursday cooking, so that I could entertain the visitors I had Thursday night. Then I spent most of Friday hanging out with the baby because she always gets super upset when visitors leave, after which I spent most of Saturday and Sunday being lazy as balls and playing my Vita because dammit, I deserved it. Monday…I honesty have no idea what happened to Monday…it’s as though it never actually existed in my timeline. And finally, yesterday, I spent most of the day on my laptop, catching up on blog posts because I’m getting used to this whole scheduling-ahead thing and I didn’t want to muck it up.
As you see, there wasn’t a lot of working on goals up in that nonsense. Time to break out the flogging hoses again.
Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.
I did get a little bit of exercise this week, I swear (although most of it was in the form of running up and down stairs while doing laundry), and I have been managing to mostly stick to water as my go-to beverage (mostly in the form of coffee and tea…without sugar, I swear). That’s pretty good, right?
If I’m honest though, this goal has been the absolute last thing on my mind recently. Not good, I know, but I’m sure you’ll give me a break when you hear why. See, I have a procedure coming up this coming Monday. Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, but it does require me to fast for the full day before the procedure. And since the procedure is later in the day,and I have to start the fasting very early in the morning (thus, the fast will really start when I fall asleep the night before) the full extent of my fasting will actually be closer to two full days. In other words, I’ve resolved to enjoy my food for the days leading up to Saturday night. For almost two full days I’m only going to be able to drink water, tea or coffee with nothing in them, clear fruit juices and Poweraid, and Jello (and friends, you just know that if Jello is the only thing I can “eat”, I’m going to end up devouring a dozen boxes of it). Basically, cut me a break on my eating habits for the past few days and the next few, because I’m not going to be able to eat at all for about 40 hours in a row in the near future. ARG.
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to the social aspect of my platform this week. It’s not that I haven’t been social, I just haven’t really been thinking about it. I’ve spent a bit of time on Twitter lately, but the big thing this past week has been Facebook. As mentioned last week, I have an Author Page now (you can see the link to it off to the right of this page…please Like!) and I’ve been interacting with that a lot, posting my blog posts there and talking to the people who wander by. My Klout score has been steadily rising in the past few weeks, so I guess that’s a good sign? I’ve never really understood the Klout system, but I’m confident that rising numbers is a good thing. 😛
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
This is the one that I’m genuinely ashamed of. I haven’t done a thing this week again. In my defense, my laptop was shanghaied for the majority of the week, so I had nothing to work on. I suppose I could have copied my files over to my husband’s laptop, but considering that his laptop overheats so bad that you can’t let it touch your bare skin, and several of the keys stick constantly, it wasn’t exactly a preferable solution. So instead I did nothing. I’m incredibly disappointed in myself, if that’s worth anything.
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
This was actually a really weird week. Because of the aforementioned shanghaiing of my laptop, I didn’t get much of anything written in the first half of the week. I was pretty confident that by the time I came to write this accountability post I was going to have a shameful word count of somewhere in the 500-word range. However, things really started looking up yesterday (after I got my laptop back) when I took to WordPress to get some posts written. I still don’t know how it happened, but somehow I ended the day with a very acceptable 6751 words. I am now very close to three quarters of a hundred thousand words, which isn’t too shabby for the end of March. I’m still about 30,000 words behind where I should be at this point, but based on last year I’m not surprised that I should be behind at this point.
And so, week 11 is down, and week 12 is going to be an odd because of that whole fasting thing. Maybe I’ll write something really weird and interesting while I’m knee-deep in Jello.
It’s been a while since I received one of these, so I was thrilled a couple of weeks ago to see that Jwls MacKay over at 2B Creative had sent me a Liebster Blog Award. It’s always so great to receive peer recognition, and I particularly like this award because it is meant to be given to bloggers with fewer than 200 followers, so as to help the gain some publicity. To participate in the award, you must answer the ten questions left to you by the person who nominated you for the award, then award ten more blogs that you think are worthy and send them ten questions of your own.
So without further ado, here are my answers to Jwls’ questions:
1. When did you begin blogging on WordPress?
My first WordPress post was written and published on February 19th, 2012, right after creating this blog. I had had several blogs, journals, websites, and the like over the years and I’d finally decided that it was time to start acting like a professional. I closed down many distractions that had been fun at the time but ultimately served me no purpose or had no future in my life, and consolidated my online presence to what I felt were the most important sites: Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, and a few others that serve a purpose. Then I created this blog to bring it all together and to give myself a place to interact with the world while writing consistently and building my own personal voice. It hasn’t grown as fast as I might have hoped, but it still amazes me every day to see that people are, in fact, logging on to read my words.
2. What is your main focus on your blog?
It started as a place to talk about writing, being a writer, and the writing process. I soon established that this kind of focus isn’t really sustainable in the long term, and it is also only really interesting to other writers. I started splicing in little stories about my own life, my opinions on things, and bits and pieces of fiction that I’d written. These days I would say that my “focus” is simply maintaining an online presence while sharing my writing and my style with the world.
3. What inspires you to write?
Art of all kinds, whether it be ancient or modern, prose or poetry, adventurous or romantic. I draw inspiration from others’ books, TV shows, movies, and video games. I see what other people have done and I think to myself, “I can do that.” When something of another person’s creation gets my heart pounding, or makes me cry, or makes me think, or turns me on, or blows my mind, or gives me goosebumps…that is what inspires me to write.
4. What is your most unusual writing place?
Probably the one I’m using right now. I’m currently scribbling this post in a 3″ notepad while I sit in a trailer full of instrumentation techs (my coworkers). I’m wearing two layers of clothes underneath a pair of dirty coveralls with screwdrivers and wrenches in the pockets, and I’m leaning the notepad on my lap as I write because the table I’m sitting at is covered in work folders, paperwork, and our lunches.
5. Does music inspire your creativity?
It depends on the music. Pop music…absolutely not. But a more classical piece…yes. Music with words doesn’t really inspire me most of the time because a lot of what’s out there is just a pile of carbon copies of the same few themes: I love you, I hate you, I miss you, I wanna party, I wanna do nasty things. But with classical music you can imagine your own story emerging from the highs and lows, the beautiful melodies and the dissonant notes. I find that kind of thing very inspiring, not to mention peaceful and relaxing.
6. Why do you follow blogs?
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one; I follow blogs because I enjoy reading them. I like hearing about what my peers have to say, what they’re worrying about today, or what achievements they’ve enjoyed recently. I also feel that “author platforms” and social media communities are a two-way street. If you want your blog posts (or status updates, or tweets, or whatever) to be read/followed/liked/commented on, then you have to take the time to do the same to others’ work.
7. What other creativity sites do you belong to? (Instagram, Instacanvas, writing.com, etc)
These days I don’t use many different creativity sites because I’m more I’m more about focusing on my blog and my fiction writing. I have an old DeviantArt account that I never bothered to close even though I never draw anymore, and I’m a member of Flickr only because it’s a treasure trove of images that I can use on the blog (if the owner has given the proper rights). As for sites that I really use, the big one is FanFiction.net. Since I love writing fan fiction, but can’t legally publish it, I love this site for sharing what I’ve written. I also have an account on the sister site, FictionPress.com, but I don’t use this as often. It’s meant for sharing original work, but since most of my original work is stuff I’d like to actually publish someday, I don’t tend to post anything there these days.
8. Do you believe the arts should be taught in school?
Not only do I believe it, but I feel that they should be given significantly more focus. I’m not saying that we should neglect important things like math and language, but I feel that artistic kids are given the shaft in today’s educational system. Creativity outside of the highly-limited art and music classes are generally frowned upon, as the system tends toward favoring wave after wave of little carbon copies who memorize and regurgitate. And I’m not just defending those kids who genuinely want to become writers, artists, or musicians…creativity is extremely important in many other fields, such as marketing, architecture, and journalism. Being able to think creatively can give kids a huge step up on an unlimited number of vocational options. Hell, being able to be a little creative and think outside the box is probably the only thing that makes me a decent instrumentation tech.
9. How old were you when you decided to develop your creativity?
Young enough to barely remember. I’d say the trigger happened sometime around the third grade. Back then was when I first started both writing and drawing. I wrote because it was fun, and it simply never stopped being fun. I drew mostly because I enjoyed the positive reinforcement I got from people when they saw me drawing. Eventually the positive reinforcement wasn’t enough for me…I wanted to actually get better, and it seemed like I never did, so drawing started to lose it’s appeal. Writing, however, has never lost any of it’s appeal to me, even during times of my life when no one was reading.
10. What is your paying occupation?
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m an Instrumentation Technician. Most people tend not to know what the hell that is, and the simplest explanation I’ve come up with is that I’m like an electrician, but I work with valves and control programs instead of motors and high voltage.
———-
Now, normally this would be the part where I nominate ten more blogs for a Liebster award. Unfortunately I won’t be doing this part, but I have a good reason…see, after the first ten minutes of sorting through the list of blogs that I follow it became evident to me that I’m one of the only bloggers I know who falls under the “200 or fewer followers” category. Almost every blog I follow has many hundreds, if not many thousands, of followers. I’m sure there must be a few blogs on my list that meet the criteria, but to be perfectly honest I’m not willing to spend the next few hours sorting through them. So, blogger friends, if you happen to fall under the category of having fewer than 200 followers, I officially nominate you for a Liebster. If you wish to accept and answer my questions, please leave a comment here letting me know so that I can check out your answers. 🙂
That said, for any who wish to accept my open award, please answer the following questions:
1. When you were a little kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
2. If you didn’t become what you wanted to become, why not?
3. What kinds of cartoons did you like as a child?
4. Be honest…are there any cartoons that you still watch now?
5. What is one skill that you really, really, really wish you had?
6. What TV show or movie could you watch over and over and over, and why?
7. If you could be any superhero in the known universe of superheroes, which one would you be?
8. What is one regret you have about your past?
9. What is one wish you have for your future?
10. If you could go back in time and tell your past self about your present self, what is something that past you wouldn’t believe about his or her future?
Hoping to see some responses!
Goal #1: Lose at least ten pounds and become healthier overall.
Week 2 has not been much more eventful than week 1 in terms of exercise and actual effort put forth into losing weight. I’ve been a little busy preparing for my upcoming return to Kearl Lake as of this coming Monday. I do have a few small things to report, however.
For one thing, I’ve been very diligent of late when it comes to getting lots of fiber into my system. Thus far it seems to be doing me good. It’s not a glorious kind of thing to share with the world, but I have a naturally nervous stomach that causes me a lot of problems, and I feel confident that getting a good amount of extra fiber into my diet is one of the keys to the issue.
Another thing is that I’ve spent the past week testing out my new Fitbit Flex. I plan to write a review on the device for tomorrow, but for now I thought it worth mentioning that it seems to be an excellent tool for assisting in a weight-loss program.
On the downside of things, I should own up to the fact that I’ve been drinking way too much 7-Up lately. I want to hit myself every time I have a glass. It’s a weakness. A calorically-charged weakness.
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
Again, this is a little difficult to report, but I’ll try my best. I’ve been pretty absent on Twitter this week…with my scatterbrained mind it’s difficult sometimes to remember to log in every so often. But on the upside of things I’ve been more present on WordPress. It’s been a while since I managed to find the time or energy, but this week I managed to sit down and actually enjoy some other peoples’ blogs for a change. It’s important to be a part of the community, right? Right.
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
I’ve been working on it! I’ve been working on it! Glory be to the manuscript gods, I’ve been working on it! I’m about a third of the way through chapter 14 (of 15). I actually felt that I was doing quite well until I realized that somehow I made chapter 14 almost three times as long as every other chapter. I really have no idea how that happened, but I’m thinking that I’m going to have to split it into two chapters. And to be honest, that annoys the hell out of me. Call me crazy, call me a little OCD, but 15 chapters just seems so much nicer a number to me than 16 chapters. *eye twitch*
But insane impulses aside, I’m getting there. I have my doubts that I’ll get there completely by the time I head out West for my first two-week shift, but I’m doing what I can. Worst case scenario I’ll have the first round of edits finished up sometime in February and ready for my beta-reader.
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
Due to the outrageous amount of editing I’ve been cramming down my own throat, week 2 was a lot better than week 1. Between the editing stints and the blog posts I managed to write 10,558 words this week, more than twice what I wrote last week. If I can keep that pace up I’ll be doing great, though I’m a bit concerned because of the aforementioned return to working out West. Hopefully I’ll still be able to find the time required to keep my word count up.
In conclusion: things are happening, little by little, and little things pile up to create big things, right? 🙂
In response to the extremely frustrating experience I just endured, I would like to take this opportunity to make a suggestion to WordPress, and you all can back me up if you like.
Dear WordPress:
I understand that you probably think that your Autosave feature is the bee’s knees. I agree that in most cases it is a genuinely helpful feature. But occasionally it is itself the cause of great misery and misfortune.
I just spent almost an hour typing up what I thought was a fairly excellent blog post. It was well over 1000 words. All I had to do before posting it was to enter a title. Somehow, when I moved to do that (I still don’t know what the hell happened), the cursor jumped back down from the title space into the post space, and approximately 800 of my words got overwritten by one letter stroke.
Guess what happened then? Yup…Autosave chose that exact moment to kick in, saving the “change” to my post and thus completely destroying it. There is absolutely no way that I’m going to recreate that post exactly as it was, nor do I have the time to try and figure out precisely what I had written and in what order. That post is, as far as I’m concerned, gone forever. Because of your Autosave feature.
I understand that most people probably love this feature. I myself have been saved by it a few times when my computer decided to crash in the middle of the post. But if I may make a suggestion…there should be an option to have Autosave save two or three different files, one at a time. Save in file 1, then file 2, then file 3, and when you come around for Autosave number 4, save over file 1 again. This simple addition would have allowed me to quickly close out of the post, load up the file from before my post was destroyed, and save my hard-written post.
Just a suggestion. Just a suggestion.
Sincerely,An Extremely Frustrated Blogger
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the new year again. We’ve crossed that barrier over into 2014 and are busy rubbing our eyes and staring ahead to all the possibilities that a new year holds. Personally, I find myself curled up on the couch under my new TARDIS blanket, plucking away this post while my husband and daughter are still asleep, hoping fervently that how I feel this morning is not a sign of what the year to come will be like. Begone, mysterious aches and pains! Go afflict someone who is actually old enough to feel this sore!
Anyway, this post isn’t about the fact that I seem to be suffering from an exceptionally painful cold (without any of the other symptoms). This post is about the fact that it is January 1st, a day rife with possibilities. What will the new year hold?
Well first of all, some of you may have guessed from this post that I wrote on Monday, that I’m going to be returning to the oil sands soon. Yes, after six straight months of glorious freedom unemployment, I’m set to begin work on the other side of the country again, starting the 21st of this month, with the same company and the same schedule that I had last time. This comes with mixed feelings, of course. It won’t be fun to leave my husband and daughter for half of every month again, and since I’ll be returning to the field instead of the control room I will find myself in a very difficult-to-get-any-writing-done position, but I do love the company, and it will be great to have some income again. What really worries me is that I’m going to be heading out to Northern Alberta in what is usually the coldest month, after having been snuggled all warm and cozy in the control room for the last half of last winter. My body may go through a bit of a shock. Luckily we always work in teams of two out there, so there will be someone to drag my frozen solid ass back to the trailers every day. Wish me luck, people. Wish me luck.
Secondly, since it’s a near year it’s time for new goals. At the beginning of 2013 I wrote out three “Wildly Improbable Goals”. Technically, I failed on all three of them, but having them down as goals definitely helped me get some things done, make some changes in my life and my way of thinking, and overall I had a rather productive year, as compared to previous years.
This year I’ve decided that I’m going to be a little less “Wildly Improbable” and a bit more, “you damn-well know that you can do this, so DO IT” with my goals. I want my goals to be things that I know I can complete, if I’d just get off my ass and work on them. So let’s start, shall we?
Goal #1: Lose at least ten pounds and become healthier overall.
I know, I know…don’t look at me like that. This is not one of those, “oh, it’s the new year so I’m going to buy a bunch of exercise equipment that I’ll only use for two weeks before it becomes a coat rack” kind of goals.
You see, I’ve been getting older, and the genes that my parents passed down to me don’t like that. I’ll be turning 30 in 2014, and while that is still pretty damn young to most people, to my physical being it’s like hitting the countdown to complete bodily failure. Things are starting to catch up with me, and I don’t like them.
For one thing, I seem to have inherited a wonderful trait from my father, wherein every second thing that I eat makes me feel like little needle-clawed demons are trying to rip their way out of my digestive tract. My father dealt with this for years before a doctor basically told him to eat a lot more fiber, and oh, throw some yogurt in there too. It sounds like a throwaway answer, but my dad has been doing great, so part of my health goal for this year is to make sure that there is always lots of fiber in my diet. Hopefully the result will be a calmer, less-demon-infested stomach.
The “at least 10 pounds” part of the goal is in there because, to be honest, I’m falling apart at the seams and I blame a good part of that on the extra 20-40 lbs that is hanging on to my body. I’m perfectly fine with the way I look right now, but I’m not fine with the way I feel. Even before the mysterious New Year’s aches-and-pains from hell, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy most of the time. I’m always sore in one spot or another, I’m extremely lethargic most of the time, and I’m so cranky and slow on a regular basis that it makes it very difficult to play with my daughter. I really believe that most of this could be fixed by losing a bit of weight (and, obviously, being more active in general), so I’m making it a goal. I’m not worried about getting down to what I perceive as the “proper” weight…I’m just going to worry about the first 10 pounds and then move on from there. Are we all cool with that? Okay, good.
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
2013 saw a lot of ups and downs for me as far as the whole social media = great author platform thing. I always managed to keep pressing forward with my blog, but other forms of social media often fell by the wayside. Twitter is one of the greatest things out there for connecting with other writers, agents, publishers, readers, and so on, and it only takes a few seconds to type up a Tweet, and yet I regularly go for weeks without Tweeting a single thing aside from the auto-Tweets that WordPress shoots out when I write a blog post.
This year I want to be more active and more diligent with my author platform. I want to show people that, yes, I’m really here, and hey, how are you doing today? More and more this is becoming an extremely important part of being a successful writer, and I don’t want to be left behind in the dust.
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
This one feels more “wildly improbable” than the others, but it’s not…it’s NOT, dammit!
I spent the last year trying to finish editing on my manuscript, and that task is almost complete. I already have a beta-reader lined up to swap manuscripts with. This year is going to be the year of really, truly, finishing a novel. I know that my manuscript has problems even before my beta-reader touches it, but I plan to sit back and wait to hear what she has to say, and then work my ass off once she hands it back. If at all possible I want to publish by the end of this year. I want my zombie novel to be out there before zombies stop being something that people want to read about (which is why I definitely will not be going with traditional publishing…man, you guys are SLOW). This is a big thing for me. By the end of 2014 I want to be a published author.
And to all my religious friends, your prays are totally welcome on this one. 😛
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
Last year I made the Wildly Improbable Goal to write one million words over the course of a year. Though that goal turned out to be completely out of my league (it didn’t occur to me until halfway through the first month that this would be over 83,000 words a month), I did end up writing significantly more words in 2013 than in any year previous…possibly in all the years previous.
I came with in striking distance of 500,000 words last year, so this year I want to exceed that goal and beat my own personal record. Half a mil over the course of a year is just over 41,000 words a month. Judging from last year it will be difficult, but I have faith that I’ll be able to pull it off.
And there you have it. Four goals for the New Year, all of them significantly more probable than not. I’m going to continue on with my accountability posts (though they’ll be moving to Wednesdays now) because personally I find nothing helps with a goal so much as admitting to the general public that you haven’t been working on it. 😛
How about it, friends and fellow bloggers? What are your goals for the New Year?
Fellow bloggers, do you ever peruse the spam section of your comments folder? I’ve been flipping through there lately whilst permanently deleting them, and I’ve got to say it’s quite a riot. The spelling and grammatical errors, the blatant inability to properly speak English, the giant walls of Chinese character text, the ceaseless waves of adds trying to sell me things like Viagra. It’s really quite amusing. That said, thank the makers of WordPress that the spam filter on this site seems to work really, really well. I think if I had to put up with all this stuff popping up in my main comments folder every day I would absolutely lose my mind. 😛
Okay then, let’s get on with it!
Health and Body Image Goal
Last week was the very embodiment of “sitting on the fence”, wavering between healthfulness and the exact opposite of thus. See, last week my husband, our daughter, and I went on a shopping trip. We traveled one province over to Fredericton, New Brunswick and shopped for two days straight…then we drove backwards a little to Moncton and shopped for another day…and then drove all the way back to Halifax and shopped for another day before finally heading home in the late hours of the night. Now the thing about four straight days of shopping is that it involves a lot of walking (healthful), and in our case also a lot of carrying the baby around because she’s a lazy little bugger (healthful to everything except my back). By all rights, by the end of that trip I should have lost about five pounds, that’s how much “exercise” I got. Ah, but then there’s the other part of a four-day shopping trip away from home…fast food. Yeah. I believe we had a healthy breakfast on two of those days, and an actual restaurant supper on one of them. Everything else was Tim Hortons coffee and donuts, Taco Bell Big Box Meals, and A&W Chubby Chicken Wraps. It goes without saying that no, I didn’t lose any weight while I was on this trip.
In other news, however, the leak in our basement that I mentioned in yesterday’s post – along with the overwhelming stench of cat urine that I couldn’t seem to locate the origins of – led me to began scouring down the basement yesterday. I’ve got it clean almost back to the pellet stove, which (you’ll have to trust me on this one) was a good bit of work. I have some more to do throughout this week, but the point is that soon I’ll have my basement back in working order and cleared of all the junk that we’ve been tossing down there, and I’ll be able to start exercising down there again. That’s not to say that I will (I’m a terribly fickle person, you see), but that’s my intention. Those of you who pray, please pray for me to have some motivation, please and thanks.
Editing Goal
This one stands exactly where it stood last week. I’m still transcribing my notebooks (they seriously feel as though they’re never going to end), and through this am also editing as I type. By all rights I should be working on editing my zombie apocalypse since that was the original subject of this goal, but these notebooks are another distraction like the supernatural romance was – I feel like if I don’t get them out of the way I won’t be able to focus on my apocalypse. It’s really quite frustrating. Sometime in the future I have to figure out how to better organize myself. I’m the very stereotype of the scatterbrained writer who can’t keep track of anything they do.
1,000,000 Word Goal
Because of the aforementioned shopping trip, I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to write this week. It’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation. The trip had a purpose, one which we achieved gloriously in my opinion, so that’s all there is to it. Despite this distraction which tore me away from my writing, however, I did manage to pluck out 11418 words. Most of that was morning pages, but there’s a bit of blogging and transcription in there as well.
And with that, I have a mini-goal for myself. My best week yet was somewhere in the range of 24,000. This week I’m going to try to break 30,000. That’s over 4200 words per day. It will be very difficult, I think, but all the transcription I have to do will surely help me. Wish me luck!
I’m not the type of person who pays a lot of attention to the news. For good or ill, most of my knowledge of what’s going on in the world around me comes from secondary sources (i.e. wherever I happen to be hanging out on the internet that day). So it was whilst browsing through some other blogs on WordPress that I happened to stumble across the news that Amazon is going to be paying authors to publish fan fiction.
People…I am beyond stoked about this, not because I think it might benefit me personally, but because it opens up a whole new world for writers who managed to put together excellent stories about characters who just happen to be copyright protected. Publishing fan fiction has been around for ages of course (what, did you think that the hundreds of Star Wars novels out there were all written by George Lucas?), but it has tended to be a very difficult world to get into. Amazon is going to widen that world, make it more accessible. They have garnered the rights to gather and publish fan fiction novels based on three popular television series (Gossip Girls, The Vampire Diaries, and Pretty Little Liars), and it is my hope and belief that this list will grow exponentially in the future. This could present a huge opportunity for the thousands upon thousands of fans out there who have put great time and effort into their previously-doomed-to-never-be-published works. Of course, there are quite a lot of fans out there who have neither the skills nor the natural talent to write something that Amazon will consider publishing, but just the idea that this is now a real opportunity is amazing to me. Just think…someday soon you could write an amazing novel based on some of your all-time favorite characters and actually make money from it!
As a fangirl of many things myself, I really have to say, I’m pretty damn excited.
What do you think about this new development? Do you think it’s going to fly? Will it be a good thing or a bad thing for fan fiction writers? Please share!
My dear, lovely readers, I want it put on record that I have no idea what happened to my Fiction Fragment Friday post for yesterday. It wasn’t until I looked at my blog stats this morning and noticed a distinct lull in traffic for yesterday that I realized no post was made. Since I had scheduled the post over a week ago I looked into it and found no post anywhere in my records. It simply…vanished. I can’t honestly say that it was the fault of WordPress and not myself, but I am gloriously infallible, so I’ll let you make your own judgements from there.
Since I had (presumably) scheduled another section of Erased, but I don’t have a copy of that file out West with me I’m going to have to go with something quick and dirty that I can type out on my iPhone since I don’t have Internet access on my tablet right now. It’s a but of a ridiculous go-ahead really, but I want to give you something since yesterday got screwed up.
With that said, here’s a Drabble I wrote a while back:
Pervert
Jake liked to hang out at fitness gyms. He wasn’t particularly into weights or cardio, and he didn’t really need the exercise; he liked to hang out and watch the women. There were the chubby ladies in jogging pants, panting and practically sweating blood in their attempts to shed the extra pounds, and there were the super skinny girls in designer exercise clothes who looked like they probably ate wheat grass and soy milk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Both types had their own particular kind of…appeal.
Jake got kicked out of fitness gyms at least three times a week.
Tuesday again! That means I’m halfway through my work shift, and that it’s time for me to feel bad about myself again! Huzzah!
First I’d like to mention a mini-goal that I reached yesterday: WordPress informs me that the post I made yesterday was my 200th. Woo hoo! Honestly I’m finding that more than a little difficult to believe…I don’t think I’ve ever stuck with anything so long before, so yay me! Here’s to another hundred posts!
On to making myself feel bad…
Health and Body Image Goal
If you could be legally punished for neglecting to take care of yourself, I’d be put away for life. I’ve been trying to eat decent foods, I will say that, but there’s only so many options at camp and after a while you start to get sick of salads and oranges and whole wheat bagels. Additionally, I’ve found myself completely unwilling to exercise at night. I keep telling myself that it’s going to happen, but it never does. I swear it’s not because I’m lazy. It’s just that I work for 12 hours plus an hour’s worth of bus rides, then I have to eat and shower, an sometimes I have to do my laundry, and… Okay, yeah, I know, I’m making excuses. Shut up. 😦
Editing Goal
And as though I weren’t feeling bad enough as it is, I have to admit that I still haven’t touched my manuscript. I’ve become so obsessed with finishing my current work in progress that I just keep writing and never get around to the editing. The caveat of that, of course, is that I’m going to end up with two manuscripts that need revision and editing. So really, I’m just punishing myself in the long run. Ugh.
1,000,000 Word Goal
Okay, here at least I can feel a little good about myself. This week, mostly between taking commissioning calls at work, I managed to scribble out 2837 words worth of blog entries and 4730 words worth of my work in progress, for a weekly total of 7567 words, my best yet this year. Yay! I may be way behind on the goal, but man, I’ve been writing a heck of a lot more than usual. I may just be a “real” writer after all!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I wrote a ton o blog posts this week but didn’t get around to typing them up, so I better get my butt in gear.
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