It’s the first Monday second Tuesday of the month, and that makes it update time.
A month into quarter two and things are coming along nicely. No new Patreon members and nothing to sell yet, but the biggest project pushing forward. Last month I wrote 34,077 words, mostly in part to the spreadsheet created as part of The Roundtable Podcast. Shout out to Nobilis Reed for maintaining the doc. While the total word count was 16k shy of the 50k I wanted for April it was still a larger word count than I managed in the first quarter. I’ve set my sights on 60k for May, and I’m sitting at 11,753 as of this morning. A touch behind but far more productive than I’ve been. The novel now sits around 44K after some cuts, and if everything goes the way I’d like it to today we should be finished with Part 1 tonight. Quite happy about that. Current grade for novel writing: B
The mega-focus on the novel has slowed our production of flash fiction. By slow I mean a dead stop. I’m not super happy about that but in the grand scheme of things I think the major project writing is more important. Patreon supporters, I’ll make it up to you as soon as the first draft is done. Current grade for Patreon support: D
We have a new initiative started this month. I posted a teaser about the Quest Giver concept last week. The concept is to help me stay on task with projects but to also have a little fun with creating a gimmick. I love role-playing, gaming, and all those aspects of entertainment and I love the idea of using those to help me be more productive in my creative world. The Quest Giver concept has me working towards goals, earning experience for certain classes, and earning tokens for overall quests completed. The system is designed to earn me a level every four quests, and I’ll also be working on an achievement system which will earn me 10% of the experience needed for my next level. Quests are tasks like completing an outline for a book, reaching a milestone in a book, getting up a theme for the podcast, creating more quest tokens, etc. These earn experience for each of the three current classes which are Dungeon Master, Word Wrangler, and Audiogineer. I have another fourth class in development but that’s for another time when I can focus on such projects. As we generate the theme for the two blogs, we’ll create a place to see what quests are coming up and what quests are completed. A large part of the Dungeon Master class centers around creating those tools. Current grade for potentially useful but weird projects: A
Speaking Audiogineer, I failed last month to get back to podcasting. Just let that one slid too long I guess. With the creation of the new system to keep me on track I should have a more active reminder that I need to stay on top of the posting. I don’t think a daily podcast will be the best bet for me. Rather going towards a weekly format will allow me the best method of staying honest, keeping topics in mind to talk about, and just in general keep me from burning out. Current grade for Podcasting: F
So our May goals:
- 60k for the novel.
- Get back to weekly podcasting.
- Gain a level in all of my classes.
Oh, and one more thing:
Yeah, that’s about right.