I’m now getting to the dangerous stage of any organizational process change. I recognize the phenomenon–a certain impatience, the thought that oh I really don’t need to do this anymore, I have the routine down, maybe it’s sufficiently internalized that I don’t need to go through this step when it comes to thinking about the executive meeting with myself every Sunday. Which always ends up becoming a big mistake, because then I am overconfident about the degree to which I’ve made these routines into habits and…yeah. Everything starts to slide, including productive patterns that haven’t quite made that final jump into habit. I overlook the reality that this past week was not as productive as previous weeks for various reasons, including body stuff, and that if I look back at what I have done this year already because of the new approach to organizing myself, these new methods work.
Yeah, this is a known failure point, not just for myself but for others who struggle with changing their processes. The 90-ish day of the method. When I was working with horses that were at the barn for rehab training, this was the period when old behaviors would start to crop up again, as a means of boundary testing. Same held true for students.
So this is why reflecting back (for humans) to see what has been able to happen is a good thing. I wish I had stressed that aspect more with my students. With the horses, it just meant a patient revisiting of early concepts and a restatement that the new rules are still in effect, no going back to the old ways.
And now I’m making myself push past this mark. I still need these organizational structures and probably will, in order to be an active and producing writer. There are no shortcuts.
What fell by the wayside this week was a lot of original drafting work. Oh, I did some edits on Federation Cowboy and got some new words down. But not every day, and not necessarily a lot of words. Cowboy appears to be one of those slow-moving works on the writing side of things, where I have to think about the process and the story. I think it is going to be a shorter novel, probably around 60k words, much like Beating the Apocalypse is. Which–would account for the slowness of the drafting. The shorter the work, sometimes the longer it takes to write. I’m packing a lot into this book and it shows, the more I work on it.
Other things. The dragon short story was the most popular of the freebies in the latest Smashwords sale. That makes me think that perhaps I should focus some energy into that particular world. I already have two of the stories written–Teacher-of-Dragons and Restoring Hope (currently out on submission under a different title). I can’t take it to Vella for drafting because Teacher has already been published, but perhaps I could turn it into an omnibus of sorts with Restoring and several other stories set in the world of the Raven Alliance. It might make more sense than pushing on with the Vortex books, which have their own issues. Hmm. The story might make a nice short book. Tales of the Raven and Dragon Alliance.
I seem to have finally settled into the new cover for Justine Fixes Everything. I didn’t like the previous image I had selected for assorted reasons, but this one evokes the mood of the book significantly better. Thematically, it hearkens back to the Netwalk books, which–Justine is heavy on the digital thought clones, which are a variant of the digital personality uploads in the Netwalk books.
I got the new version of Realization (light copy-edited interior, new cover) uploaded to Ingram and anticipate being able to approve it in a few days. Working now on the interior of Justine and plan to rerelease this week with the new cover, in hopes that it is a better match for the other People of the Martiniere Legacy books. Justine is the last of the revised Martiniere covers to be issued. Then it’s working on the paperback versions of the 2022 Netwalk books. Once I’m done with Netwalk, then I plan to redo the Goddess’s Honor covers and interiors. The interiors are…well, they were all done in Scrivener and there are issues. Fix those up while working on the new series set in that world, which is still being stubborn about telling me what it’s about. The Raven Alliance book may be the new distraction, or it may not be. We shall see.
