Okay, so. New idea: Focus.
I’m going to try to focus.
You know, only do one thing at a time? I’m not sure I’ve ever really tried it before… well, once… I’ll get to that. But here’s the idea: For the rest of this year (0) and all of next year (1), I’m going to focus on only doing one … sort of thing at a time.
For instance, I’ve roughed out on a calendar to spend the next four months (ie: November thru Remember) focused on Writing. Then four months (Triober thru Exober) focused on Art (specifically on painting), and the next four (September thru December) focused on … well, I have a particular complex project in mind for the end of the year. And then, depending on how things have gone, perhaps four months (Ichiember thru Catember) focused on Comics (including the Mouse Project, now with a deadline over a year in the future).
And while I want to try to focus, I don’t want to feel trapped, so I want to plan to allow … say, one day each month for each of the four areas of my primary interest (that is, four days out of each thirty working on other things), focused for one day on that one thing. (The five areas of focus, by the way, are Writing, Art, Comics, Coding, and … that other project.) This would allow me to spend a full day this month coding the new aggregation system for Modern Evil, for instance.
More importantly and to the point, it will hopefully allow me to stop allowing all my interests to play each other against the middle, cancelling each other out. November 2002 I had just lost my job and was attempting NaNoWriMo (officially) for the first time. I had no other concerns that month to speak of, I was not trying to paint or draw comics or … anything else. I was just trying to write novels. I wrote something approaching … one hundred thousand words that month, over half of them in the last eight days of the month, when my focus really kicked in and I did nothing but write and think about writing all day, every day, for eight days. NaNoWriMo 2003 did not go as well. In addition to spending a week on “vacation”, I had other things stressing me out and taking up my time during the bulk of the days after that, and then nights I was drawn to other projects (comics, painting, &c.), and while I got the novel “done” I certainly never focused on it (and it isn’t particularly good).
Of course, this brings to point a very poignant point, that my days are not my own as long as I live in Pine. My father moves up here tomorrow morning. Now, in the time since I moved to Pine myself, depending upon my grandfather’s health, I have had some time off, mostly depending upon what days my father was here or not. (That is, I could use the days that grandpa wasn’t feeling well and dad wasn’t here for my own purposes, most of the time.) Now, while my grandparents are both doing worse and worse all the time (not to be celebrated in any way, but expected, so not worried over either) my father will be here all day, every day. Which may mean that … well, my dad will have to sleep SOMETIME, and I suppose that’s when I’ll be able to work on my own interests… Wait, damnit, Heath is here now too… I’m sure he’ll suck an appropriate chunk of my time from every day. So, it must be that after my father and I have done so much work that he passes out, and then after my brother and I … I don’t know, do more, and they’re both sleeping, THEN I’ll have some time to myself.
To focus on writing.
Yep.
Between 11PM and 6AM, probably.
Sigh.
I really, really need to get my hands on some Provigil (modafinil). Maybe sleep every other night. Work straight through the other ones.
Yeah.
So.
No comics for now (except maybe a Four-Hour Comic now and again), no new paintings (though I’ll see about getting the latest ones photographed), not much work on the website (though again, I expect to devote a day sometime soon to rebuilding the aggregator). Writing.
And these long entries don’t count.
My rough goal for the next four months is 12 completed written works available for purchase through Modern Evil, at least two of them novels. That is, I want to do a lot of short stories, and sell them via BitPass, and perhaps as an anthology via Cafepress. And I want to have Lost and Not Found finally reach its final edit. And I want to either write, re-write, edit and re-write a completely new novel or re-write, edit and re-write the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo ’03, plus package it and get it for sale. All of this before 311.1 (4/29/2004).
Which should be do-able, if I can just focus.
