Refocusing, Again

To say I’ve been a little busy this year would be an understatement.

In the past six months, I have learned how to develop a game and created one for my capstone project, completed my last semester of college (thirty-page papers and all), and moved back home only to turn around and begin working on packing for my big move at the end of June. With working two part-time jobs and completing classes through most of this period, I’ve barely had a moment to breathe, let alone write.

And with that much to do, it’s safe to say that I hit a little bit of a burnout.

Over the last few years, burnout has been an unfortunate friend who arrives every once in a while, but this edition sucked a little more than usual, mostly because of all the goals I had planned for this year.

So, with it being halfway through the year, I think it’s time to take a breath, refocus, and adjust some of my goals to be a bit more attainable.

LIFE GOALS

In my life as a whole, I had plenty of year-long goals at the start of the year. Here, I have a bit of leeway, as some of my aspirations were only going to happen once I moved, such as volunteering. Otherwise, I’ve made progress on consuming more content, especially video games, and cooking lots of yummy food.

Then, there’s the workout section of things. While I had a stretching and workout routine for a month or so, I struggled to keep myself on schedule once the semester got into full swing. Additionally, I didn’t get to run any 5k races during the first half of this year, so I genuinely have no idea what my current time would be.

Therefore, going into the second half of the year, I need to focus on my physical strength and endurance with more consistent workouts and stretching and look into 5k races in my new area. Of course, this is alongside continuing to work on the goals I previously mentioned, but overall, I can continue to pursue the goals of my general life as I did in the first half of the year, just with more focus.

WRITING GOALS

For my writing, on the other hand, I’ve had a lot less success. I blame much of that on my senior capstone project, but there were also some miscellaneous issues that arose in my life during the first half of the year that made it impossible to open a writing document.

No matter my excuses, though, my lack of progress in the past six months means that I have to rethink my goals a bit.

First off: 525,600 words in a year? That’s not happening. While I think that goal would have been possible with consistent work throughout the whole year, I’ll be lucky if I get to even half of that. Though this challenge was fun originally, I’m going to have to put it aside until next year at the earliest.

Then, I have the projects I wanted to complete: two novels through betas and a draft of a themed short story collection. Progress on these has been minimal, to say the least, and beta readers for both novels may not be possible. My new goal is to still draft the themed short story collection, but I’m moving the goalposts for the sequel to Ghosts of the Steel Road to a draft only. The Unwanted Sacrifice, on the other hand, still feels feasible for a beta round at the end of this year, and that’s what I’m holding onto for the moment.

Finally, I have the constant thorn in my side: social media presence. Again, I did great here for the first part of the year, and then I proceeded to disappear for four months. Not ideal, especially given the lack of promotion for my novel. Here, I really need to focus, which starts with setting a new schedule for my blog posts and coming up with new ideas for actually posting on social media. My newsletter is also something that I need to focus on again, as I had great aspirations for it that never came to fruition.

Though the chaos will not settle just yet, I have plans in place to keep myself a little more consistent. First things first will be the Pathfinders Writing Collective Bootcamp Challenge! I’ll have more about my participation in this challenge next week, including my goals for the six-week challenge.

But even beyond that challenge, my focus for the second half of this year is to get words down. After all, how else am I supposed to show this world the worlds I have in my mind?