Writers are not the only professionals with “those” jobs. The kind of jobs that, if you need to take time off for illness, vacation, family emergency or whatever, your work simply continues to pile up. It almost makes me miss working in retail and customer service. In those jobs, if I took a day off, others covered the daily work.
OK, I don’t miss it that much.
When I first started my author blog, I was enthusiastic and thought I could write a post every day. I didn’t…because I knew that was a pace I couldn’t maintain. Two or three times a week was good.
About a year ago I added a blog for The Cities of Luna, which comes out with every full moon. I was posting there regularly, both story-related and bonus posts, but I’ve slacked off in the last few months. Switching from the small press I was working with to self-pubbing, I am re-vamping a lot of stuff.
Last week I posted goals for ROW80 that included doing a content post every Friday. Then, I was feeling sick and didn’t do one. Not a big deal, except that I didn’t do one last week either. Friday posts are one of those things that I can abandon if I need to. I don’t have to make up the work if I miss it, I can simply let it go. Yet, the posts have value, and I lose something if I don’t make them. Same with posts on The Cities of Luna… individually, they don’t matter much. But taken as a whole, they contribute to the holistic whole of promo. A friend recently saw one of her books surge in popularity. She didn’t do anything different, other than paint her bathroom. (She’s considering painting more rooms now to see if that helps!) However, she is very conscientious about keeping her social media presence and promo up to date and active. Although this isn’t a guarantee that books will sell, the converse is true. If she hadn’t kept her promo active, that surge probably wouldn’t have happened.
A few years ago, I did my interviews ahead of time so I wouldn’t have to worry about them for NaNoWriMo. I only have a couple more weeks to prepare…that’s not going to happen this month. I also now have a much smaller freezer than I used to, so I can’t make meals ahead of time. Our income is also smaller, so we can’t just go out to eat when I’m busy writing.
So…maybe I need to rethink that goal about doing a content post every Friday. They definitely eat into my available energy. I lose the value, but my resources might be better spent buckling down on the actual writing for a while.
OK. Revised goals. (I almost wrote “So…OK….” which, if you watch my mini interviews on YouTube, is apparently my catchphrase.) I am going to take a break from the Friday posts for a while. Not just November, but December, which is always so very busy in so many ways. Hopefully in January I will be going back to school to finish my Bachelor’s degree, which means a new kind of busyness. I am also hoping to kickstart an in-print collection of The Cities of Luna around that time.
I have plans. Big plans. But I think in order to best implement them I need to step back for a while and lay the groundwork.
Goals Report:
Not so hot, thus the revision. Check back next week.
AmyBeth Inverness 
First off, I am jealous that some one did your job when you were off a day from the previous “day job”. I had vacation all last week and just yesterday afternoon I felt finally caught up on the things my co-workers didn’t do for me.
I always wonder about the value of my blogs too. i know that I have faithful followers, but do they really miss me when I take time off? I try to post to my writing blog twice a week, and three times to my other blog. But sometimes I just don’t have the time. Or I post something that is lame just to get something out there. So, I don’t know. I guess we have to do what feels right and be ready to make changes.
There’s nothing wrong with revising your goals. You have to make things work for you, not against you. It sounds like you’re making the right move. There’s always going to be stuff we wish we could get to but there’s only so much time in the day.
I’m much better about this than I used to be. It took a lot of work to get over the “I CAN DO IT ALL!!!” mentality!
Having writing goals is important but you can’t make them so rigid that they work against you instead of being motivating. It sounds like you’re doing a good job keeping flexible and realistic while still keeping momentum. I think that’s great!