A delayed drawing and what else I’ve been up to lately…

Hello again, dear friends and followers. Sorry I haven’t been updating more often, but I guess I got out of the habit when I was off at Odyssey.

So, first off, I wanted to share another ‘Right side of the brain’ drawing tonight. I did this at the end of August, another perspective exercise, featuring the corner of a room:

I do like the way it came out, though sometimes I worry that I’m not getting too much from these exercises the way I come back to them every few weeks. I need to get started on some more drawing for September, maybe I’ll get some done this weekend.

So, what else have I been up to? Well, reading some cool short stories on my Kindle, (and out of the free copy of Asimov’s Magazine that Sheila Williams gave us when she came to lecture at Odyssey; that was my ‘to read in line’ staple back when I was at Fan Expo.) Also keeping up with Team Ambitious, the Odyssey class of 2013’s online critique circles project. Back when I was in New Hampshire, doing two critiques a day didn’t seem like a lot. Now, with a full-time job, getting two finished in two weeks can loom large.

I’m back to the ‘How to Think Sideways’ course again, working on my Song Rater app for Android, (that’s going pretty well, except that my Singleton appears to be losing data!) still reading slush for James Gunn’s Ad Astra, and I finally mailed off a cheque for my tenant’s insurance. Oh, and I think I’ve managed to fight off an ear canal infection with the help of some over-the-counter meds. Fun stuff. 😉

 

IWSG: There’s always more goals to reach for

Hey there, welcome to the August 2013 meeting of the Insecure Writers Support Group! I’m still struggling with my insecurities about knowing when my stories are ready to submit, but rather than ramble on about that, I thought I’d share another source of insecurity; monthly to-do lists.

I’ve been coming up with to-do lists of creative goals for several years now, a habit I picked up over at Stringing Words. Almost always, because I’ve got an optimistic and competitive bent, I come up with a long list of around a dozen projects, and most of the time I leave several of them unfinished to roll over to the next month.

I’ve talked with Elizabeth about this, and she always tells me that’s a great spot to be in. “Aim high, shoot for the middle” is her usual catchphrase, and I try to take that advice to heart. But sometimes it’s hard for me not to look at my end of month progress reports and feel like a failure, or get this insane determination to push harder next time, even when I don’t have the energy to keep up that pace.

For August, I had ten goals listed. Five of them, I definitely accomplished, including one where I definitely went above and beyond the target. One more I feel very confident in marking as a win, even though there might be a technicality that a nay-sayer could argue. (That goal was to stay caught up on the Ad Astra slushpile, and two new stories came in just before midnight on August 31st.)

For one more item on the list, I pulled a late substitution, and instead of revising “Gotta Have that Look” to submit to critters, I did some superficial edits to “Love is a Masterpiece” and sent that in instead, because I wasn’t feeling confident on where I wanted to go with GHTL. Two more goals I made progress on, but definitely didn’t finish; fanvidding and my “How to Think Sideways” lessons. And the last one, submitting a manuscript to a paying market, I can’t even give myself a partial.

So I was looking at that list and giving myself something like a seven out of ten. Elizabeth and Rinelle both cheered me on when they did their own end-of-month updates, pointing out that I’d accomplished a lot, and I know I have. But it’s hard to feel that way somehow.