Unknown ♥

There are so many people out there who will tell you that you can't. What you've got to do is turn around and say "watch me." --Unknown

It's a little corny, I know, but I like it.  Having just read Chuck Wendig's post about self doubt, the idea of losing confidence has been on my mind lately.

Last night, I got into a... not an argument, exactly.  More of a discussion... about self-publishing and why I should have sought out an agent and not self-published Aigaion Girl.  And for a second, I thought, Shit.  What if I went the wrong route? Maybe I shouldn't have done what I did.  Maybe-- and then I realized that despite his good intentions, the person I was talking to is not a writer, has not spent the last eight or nine years researching this and knows a lot less about the way the publishing industry works than I do*.  In short, I realized that I actually know what I'm talking about.

So this morning, I woke up early and started to plan my writing for the next few months.  Not a day-to-day plan, but something fairly rigid which includes reminders about important marketing-type stuff, like posting something on Twitter and my Facebook fan page at least four times throughout each month.  It, of course, also includes bigger writing projects like writing and editing fiction (for example, November is blocked off for NaNoWriMo).

I'm hoping I can stick to it and actually get some decent writing done this fall. I'm going to write some amazing things this fall and I am going to seriously boost my readership.  Watch me.

*He had some very nice things to say about the story, though. 
P.S. If you're wondering why I captioned the image with the same quote, it's because I hot linked the picture.

Picking Your Battles (or, at least the order they come in)

I have so much going on right now. Not just in my non-writing life (which is wonderful and crazy-intense), but my writing world as well. I've got my normal 60+ stories on the go - I've been trying to pear (pare?) the list down to just a few, so I can complete some of them, and I think I'm down to about 5 that I'm actively writing. What I've discovered: 5 is still too many. I remember the wonderful years between '02 and '07ish, when I could keep all of my characters and storylines mostly straight in my head (2004 saw the introduction of the Characters spreadsheet, which I used to keep my 300+ characters in order and avoid reusing names), when I could write two or three novels simultaneously and not get confused, or figure out the entire plot to a new story and keep it straight in my head long enough to write it down.

So the question is, how do I narrow my list down even further? I don't want to give up on any of my stories, I'd like to think that I'll write them all, eventually, but the problem is that for every story I complete I start at least two, so how am I ever going to achieve that?

To get the 5, I've used a rough set of criteria based on what I feel like writing, what I can complete in the shortest amount of time and what has the greatest publishing potential, all of which, for reasons I don't quite understand, kind of makes me feel like a sell out. I don't know what else I can do to shorten the list, I honestly don't.

So how do I (or how does any writer) decide which projects to work on and which to push to the (seemingly endless) back burner?

Three Days 'Till NaNoWriMo 2010

...

O_O

Who's ready? Because I know I'm not...

Eep.