February 2020 Goals

Ah, February, the month of love!

Unless you’re single, like me. Then other than maybe a loved ones birthday(looking at you dad!), it’s just another month. And a short one at that. Even on a leap year like this, it’s still short.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t set goals and do our damndest to make them happen despite being short an extra day or two.

So, what am I hoping to accomplish this month?

1. First things first, I really want to get the good maps for ‘Side Quest’ done. If nothing else, this. I worked too hard last month to just shove this to the side.
2. I want to finish thought dumping project Death. I’m hoping I can get it ready to be outlined in Spring. I kinda want this to be the project I work on in NaNoWriMo, but we got time for that.
3. I wanna see what other writing contests have opened up this month. There might be something now that I can and want to participate in.
4. Because of my funk with WftGK, I’m hoping to take it slow. But I’m being optimistic and hoping to get halfway through the edits I need to.
5. I want to finish the character profiles for ‘Side Quest’. For this, because it is going to be a multi-book series, I really want to get to know all my characters and how they would react. And if I can finish this…
6. I want to try and thought dump at least a portion of ‘Side Quest’, at least five more quests anyway.
7. I want to start the rough draft for RotDE. And get to at least the end of part one. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
8. And, finally, I want to read at least two books this month. We’ll see if this happens.

So, those are all the things I’d like to get done this month.

What are some of your goals for this month? I’d love to know if you’d like to share.

That’s all I have for you right now. I hope you’re having a wonderful day, and if it’s not wonderful I hope it gets better. And I will see you next time.

-T.R. Flynn.

January 2020 Wrap Up

Is it just me or did this month go by really fast?

Maybe this is just how time works when you get older, and that’s why we can’t keep track of it and the events that have occurred.

But, that is a theory for another day. Today, we are here to see just how far I’ve come over these past thirty days(spoiler, not as far as I would like) and what needs to be worked on.

So, for starters, I got partially through WftGK edits. I’m still not sure if this rut is bred from boredom of the project, or if my passion for it has completely fizzled out. I’m hoping if I go slow with it while working on other things I want to get done this year that I will get it done, albeit much later than I had initially hoped to finish it.

I have started looking into writing contests, but so far I haven’t found anything that piques my interest or has a reasonable cut off date yet. I plan to keep looking though.

I ended up wanting to do two maps for ‘Side Quest’, and I have both rough drafts done. As well as a guide book for the entire Realm that I plan to use a lot. But I don’t have the finished products of them yet. I plan to be finishing them soon in February. But I really like making maps and creating lore and backstories for every place, even if it’s just a little line about this is what it’s called, how it got its name, and what the main thing about the place is. So, if you want to know how I did my maps, I’ll be more than happy to share that once I’m done. And I’ll throw pictures up on Twitter too.

I have actually read three books this month, and I’m really happy to be ahead like that.

In regards to project Death, as I’ve been calling it, I have most of the characters laid out. I have a fair amount left to add to their character profiles, but I’m pretty happy with how I’m doing it. I don’t have the entire story out of my head and ready to organize yet, but I got a fair amount through. I’m pretty happy with how much I managed to do.

I did not start RotDE at all this month. I got things in order for it, but I haven’t actually written anything yet. I’m hoping to start and get at least to the beginning of part two next month. I think that’s reasonable.

Now, in regard to the weekly posts, I’ve been putting up, the LifeLogs as I’ve been calling them. What do you think of them?

I’ve noticed I’ve been getting about the same amount of traffic, if not a little bit more since I’ve been posting them. I do plan on throwing in some of my more ‘regular’ content as I feel I’m qualified to speak about certain things or share my experiences. But I’d like to know if there’s a certain time table you’d prefer to see them on, i.e. once a month, once every three months, every other week, etc. I’d love to know if you wouldn’t mind sharing a comment.

I will say it has been really nice to not have to stress out so much about trying to figure out what to post every week. It’s just sitting down for a minute and thinking, what have I done? What have I learned? What is something I’m struggling with? What do I want to share?

But I still want to know what you think.

Anyway, that’s all I have for you right now. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see next week. Or anything you’d like me to discuss.

I hope you’re having a wonderful day, and if it’s not wonderful I hope it gets better. And I will see you next time.

-T.R. Flynn.

Life Log #2

Hello everyone. I am back with another reflective post, mostly because I have nothing of major relevance to anything right now to talk about. So I’m here to post about my most recent revelations. If you’re planning on skipping, feel free. Otherwise, grab a warm beverage of your choice and strap in.

Why warm you might ask? Because it’s like -20C, not an exaggeration for the record, and I’m really cold despite the fact the heat is on. Anyway, if you’re still here, let’s move onto the meat of this ‘issue’. I’m using that term loosely here.

So, I get to this point a lot with various pieces I’m working on, and I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I just hit a wall with my writing. And very rarely is it with my actual writing. It’s usually after the sixth round of edits that I’m looking at a piece and I’m just done with it.

It’s not even so much that I hate the piece. I still love it and think it has value and might actually mean something to someone other than me. But I’ve just lost complete interest in it.

This might go back to my time of writing fanfiction, something I’m going back into on a new blog, where I had almost instant gratification. And I had likes and people asking for more. But at the same time, I was only posting these things when I felt they were ready.

And right now, I know this piece, isn’t ready. I’m referring to War for the Good King, which now also encompasses Trials for the Princess Ryanne. I feel like they flow better as one cohesive story as opposed to two or three separate books in a series. Anyway.

I know the book has to get done. Even if it’s not what I want to be my debut novel to be, more so that I can have the experience of editing, figuring out the pacing, going through the can of worms that is beta readers. And I know I need all this under my belt, but what I don’t know is if this piece is just dead in the water to me and has served its purpose, or if I’m just really distracted by the other things I have in the works that it’s officially on the back burner.

And I think that’s the most frustrating part. I know I need to get it done. I want to get it done. But there are these seven other sparkly things I want to jump into, and I’ve been working a lot on WftGK that I don’t know which it is or if it’s a combination of both. Or maybe I’m just bored with the project and it’s best if I put it down for a little while now and come back to it later.

So, that’s all I got for you today. How are you liking these life logs? I know it’s very different from what I usually put up but I kinda like them.

What’s something that you’ve been struggling with recently that you’re not sure about? I would love to know if you wouldn’t mind sharing. Only if you’re comfortable of course.

And with that, I hope you’re having a great day, and if it’s not great I hope gets better. And I will see you next time.

-T.R. Flynn.

2020 Goals

Happy New Year everyone!

I hope this year will be good for us all. But we shall see.

So, seeing as it is the first day of the new year, we all know what that means! New year resolutions are being thrown around left, right, and centre. And I’m no different. I’m getting on this bandwagon and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me.

So, what are my goals for the new year? Well, let’s get into that.

1. Firstly if you haven’t seen my update post about what I”m going to be doing with TftPR and WftGK, I’ll link that HERE for you to check out, otherwise, this won’t make sense. I want to finish the edits for War for the Good King(which I think is the working title I’m going to keep referring to it by), get it all clean and polished and ready to be torn apart by beta readers. Which brings me to my next point.
2. I want to get WftGK put through at least one round of beta readers this year. If possible I’d like to get it through two and start querying by the end of the year, beginning of next year, but we’ll see.
3. I want to get serious edits with the anthology done. I have several things I need to reconsider as it is, so this will need some serious work. I’m hoping to get at least a good chunk done this year.
4. I would like to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve never done it before, I’ve heard things from people who swear by it and from people who think it’s ridiculous. But, I don’t have any personal opinions on it just yet, so I want to try it myself. I’m not quite sure which project I want to work on for it yet, but I’ll figure that out, probably come summer.
5. Now, if I do end up doing NaNoWriMo, and not having a break down like I did last year, I would like to do daily updates on here about my progress and my word count thus far. Why? Because I’m a masochist, that’s why.
6. One of the bigger projects I’ve been planning out last year and one I’m super excited about is something I’m calling ‘Side Quest’ for right now. I have it mostly figured out, but I’m trying some new things in terms of world-building, figuring out characters, and even my outlining. So, for this year I want to get my character creation and world-building done. If I can also get it outlined that would be amazing, but I’m not going to hold myself to just yet.
7. This is a heavy outlining year for me because I have another project I’m super excited for, and that I really want to get outlined as well. This one, because the working title I have it under gives a little too much away, I’m just going to call project ‘death’. I’m sure everyone has a death project in the works somewhere. So, I want to get that outlined as well if I can.
8. I would like to enter at least one writing contest this year. Last year writing contests just did not happen at all for me, so, I’m gonna give it another shot with something much more manageable than before.
9. Once again we venture back into my mind and wonder just what the hell I’m thinking because I have another giant project that I want to get outlined and get a proper working title for because right now the best I got for it is ‘Steampunk 4’… I will give you a minute to get over how ridiculous that sounds… We good now? Cool. You understand where I’m coming from. Now, this project is much more in the preplanning phase than it is the outlining phase, so I’d like to get it completely planned out and the outlining at least started before the end of the year.
10. I got Realm of the Demon Empress outlined last year. This year I would really like to get the rough draft written. Whether or not this is the project I’m going to use for NaNoWriMo, I don’t know just yet. But I can say fairly confidently, probably not.
11. Now, this one might sound a little bit insane, and that’s okay. I got my start/love of writing from writing fanfiction. I stopped writing it when I decided I was going to start getting serious about my actual writing and focus all my energy on that. But I loved writing fanfiction, and I want to get back into it. So, this year I wanna pull the dust off my old blog and go back to posting on that. It’s not going to be every week like I had posted before, but at least once a month I’d like to aim for.
12. Just like last year, I want to try and read at least 25 books. I’m sure I can do it.
13. This goal doesn’t have anything to do with writing, but I want to take up bullet journaling. I’ve seen them everywhere last year and I really want to get into it. And what better time than the new year?

So, that’s all I have for you today. What are some of your goals for the new year? I’d love to know if you’d like to share.

I hope you are having a wonderful new year, and if your day isn’t going well I hope it gets better. And I will see you next time.

-T.R. Flynn.

2019 Wrap Up

It has been a year.

I moved. My parents opened up a restaurant. I took several long breaks, some were desperately needed, others were mandatory due to the move.

It’s been interesting. I have to give it that.

This was also the first year in which I had set actual goals for myself that I wanted to get done. Last year, 2018, I only wanted to see what I could and couldn’t do over the course of a year as I worked on my writing and building a platform.

So now, much like my usual monthly wraps, I’m wrapping up the year to see what I managed to do and see what I realistically can and can’t do for next year.

So, let’s get on with it.

Trials for the Princess Ryanne and War for the Good King are going through major overhauls right now. I’m writing this post before I’m writing the post addressing it. But needless to say, neither of those are done at this moment.

As for the anthology, I have the outlines fixes, most of the rough drafts written up, some of them are typed up and on my computer, most of them have titles, but I’m not really happy with the title for the book itself just yet. So, I would say I’m about seventy percent done with the first phase of this piece. As I have said before, I came up with a few more stories that I really want to put in that tie up some more loose ends, so I still have those I need to do.

I’ve abandoned the idea for a newsletter for this year. And, honestly, I think I’m going to leave that idea for now. At this moment, I don’t really feel like I make enough quality content, or am a popular enough author to warrant monthly newsletters. Perhaps in the next few years, I’ll implement one, but for right now it just doesn’t seem like a good idea for me.

As for the revamp of the site I wanted to do. Well… You can see how that turned out. It didn’t. I’m not even really sure what I was planning to do in terms of revamping the site. I think more than anything I just wasn’t super into the layout or pictures. But I can fix that eventually if I’m still so inclined. But I’m not going to worry about that right now.

About the twelve writing contests, I wanted to enter. Yeah… that didn’t happen. I even changed my goals for this to be one contest before the end of the year. That still didn’t happen. But that’s okay. I had so much going on, I’m not upset about it.

I managed to read more than twenty-five books this year. For those of you who follow me on Goodreads, you’d see that at this moment I’ve read twenty-six. I still have a couple weeks until the end of the year at the time of writing this, so I’m not sure what the actual final count is yet. But I’m happy I managed to do this. Especially when I changed this goal from twenty-five to twenty because I wasn’t sure I could do the extra five. But I did. So, I’m very happy about that.

I did manage to outline Realm of the Demon Empress. And I’m very happy with how it’s turned out so far. It took way longer than I first expected to properly outline it and add in all the detail and extra scenes I wanted. It ended up being sixty-something pages before, and about thirty-one after I typed it up and printed it out. So I’m very happy about that.

I didn’t manage to write three short stories this year, but I did manage to write one. And I’m very happy about the premise of it, less so about the way it ends. But, you know what, it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around, it just has to exist.

I did do a blog event/challenge. The 12 days of Blogmas, which was actually a lot of fun.

I didn’t do a one year anniversary post. That time passed while I was still unpacking and trying to figure my room out after the move. So I couldn’t. But that’s okay, there’s always next year.

I haven’t finished ‘Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Getting Serious About Writing Part 2’, but I am working on it. It’s certainly getting there.

I stopped trying the weekly writing prompts. I didn’t like how it looked on the blog, and on top of that, they weren’t my personal prompts. So I felt kinda icky taking them, despite the fact I tried to give credit where it was due. So that stopped.

I’ve made a few playlists on Youtube for the various pieces I’m working on, and the tone I need them to set. But they aren’t completely done, and there are a few I still need to make up.

And I did the research I needed to, to a degree. I still have a bit more I need to do to get it as accurate as I want to though.

So, calculating it all out, marking the ones I only partially completed as a half, I got five out of fifteen done. It’s not bad. Especially when you consider the fact I realized several things weren’t going to happen, and everything that happened this year.

Overall I’m pretty happy with what happened. And I’m looking forward to getting more done next year. Or, tomorrow I guess.

What did you manage to get done this year? What did you manage to tick off your list for the new year? I’d love to hear if you’d like to share.

I hope you’re having a great new years eve, and if it’s not great I hope it gets better. We’re about to enter a new decade, meaning we have new opportunities awaiting us. And I will see you next time.

-T.R. Flynn.