A new novel of mine, Cubicles, Blood, and Magic, is getting ready to ship out in e-book format to various e-bookstores over the next month or so. Plans are in the works to have a print version ready by the end of 2012.
I’m going to see if I can get a JPEG of the cover up tonight on the website. It came out great considering the very limited budget Osuna had for cover design.
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Tagged Cubicles Blood and Magic, Dorelai Chronicles, L. M. May news
For the past month, every time I sat down to write a major post about goals, productivity, and other topics of interest to me, I’ve ended up tossing out what I wrote instead of posting it. Too much of it read like boring platitudes.
I was probably spouting too many platitudes because there were a couple of life crises that happened during the last two months behind the scenes, and as a result I had to hunker down and focus on using what little time I had to just write. Everything else–blogging; getting the editing done on stories to be published as ebooks; marketing plans–got temporarily paused.
I now call times like these the “Time of Turtle Steps,” because even when I keep working, I feel like a turtle surrounded by hares. It feels like everyone else is racing past me while I plod along far, far behind.
And yet, I’ve now learned enough to know that I’m wrong. Those turtle steps add up over time if I keep doing them step by step by step…the hard part is to keep going. Too often we stop out of despair.
Let me give an example from my own experience. In October, a couple of crises hit at the same time.
I wasted a lot of mental energy in October beating myself up for my slowed pace in writing and in working on my career. There was little time to write, and my final word count for the month was 23,255 words.
In November, I decided that while I couldn’t participate in NaNoWriMo since I wanted to keep working on my novel in progress, I could at least change my attitude and stop beating myself up. The crises continued to eat up lots of time in November, but once I accepted that I was a turtle, I found I could mentally relax and enjoy the writing more when an opportunity appeared to grab an hour to write, and I passed the 50,000 word mark for November two days ago.
So my productivity more than doubled once I stopped beating myself up about my writing pace and lack of time to do career tasks.
There are times in our lives when a crisis hits and we have to jettison everything but the most essential tasks. Be kind to yourself and don’t beat yourself up for the slowed pace. It’ll just make it harder to get anything done.
Be a turtle. Do each step by step by step, and keep going…and you’ll be surprised by how far you can get in a month. I certainly was.
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Posted in Life, Psychology of writing, Time Management
Tagged Blogging, Goals, Productivity, Psychology of writing
