Renee Carter Hall

Reposted from a November entry, with some updates and changes...

1. Finish at least one short story per month. (This can include completing current works in progress or finishing something new. Generally, "finish" should mean "complete the story to the point that it's ready to send out to editors," but I might make exceptions depending on how many rewrites, how long the drafts are, any major unforeseen life events, and so on.)

2. Submit to at least three markets on my "someday" list. (This is a list of, currently, seven markets that I would like to have my short fiction published in eventually. Note that I do not say "get accepted to" any of these, since I have no control over that other than doing my best on the stories and then getting the submissions out there.)

3. Put at least one long short story/novella up for sale on Smashwords. (I think I know which story I'll start with. The draft is about two-thirds complete from NaNoWriMo 2009, though what I have probably needs some structural/pacing work.)

4. Work on my website. (Got a few pages built over the weekend, and starting to figure out how the homepage will look.)

5. Create enough visual art/craft items to be able to finally open an Etsy shop. (Admittedly, this goal is starting to feel less important compared to the writing ones, but I don't want to forget about it entirely.)

I managed to get one last acceptance before 2010 closed out -- my story "Swear Not By the Moon" was accepted (as a reprint) to the anthology Bewere the Night. I'll make a separate post in a bit with a quick rundown of links for 2010's acceptances/publications, even though it's somewhat depressing to me because it's quite a bit shorter and less varied than I'd like it to be.

Which brings me to my overarching writing resolution for the year: Complain less, create more. Regrettably, I'm beginning to get the same sort of impression of fellow writers that the screech owl in Bambi has about relations: "If they're bigger than you, you can't bear them because they're proud, and if they're smaller they can't bear you because you're proud." I recognize that I spend too much time feeling inadequate about what I'm able to do or publish compared to others, or about what other people want to read/publish/buy, and for this year I need to work on keeping my focus on my own work and on what I truly want to do, instead of worry about everybody else's stuff and how much better they're doing at all of it than I am. Obviously, this isn't so much a writing thing as a personality thing (I've always been prone to envy and what I suppose you'd call envy-induced depression), but I can at least make an effort.

For now, though, I have to turn the focus to visual art. My sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project has to be postmarked by the 15th of this month, and true to form, I have procrastinated until almost the last possible moment. (Procrastinators of the world, unite whenever you get around to it! Maybe next week! If we feel like it!) Add in an art commission that's been stalled and overdue for weeks (the commissioner is a saint for being this patient with me, really), and I'll likely be spending the rest of this month in a flurry of pencil and pastel and watercolor and whatever else I can find to stuff into this thing, plus finishing the commissioned piece. My husband tells me I do my best work under this sort of pressure. I can only hope he's still right. At any rate, the deadline gives me an excuse to just do whatever comes into my mind and not worry so much about it being perfect or even that good, which is what I need right now.