I feel as though I’m truly starting to find a good balance between my work life, my writing life, and my home life. I don’t feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew as I’ve been setting myself up for success with manageable goals. When August ended, I didn’t feel the need to rush myself to finish my goals. By the end of the month, I was happy about the things I was able to achieve and, for the first time in a long time, didn’t beat myself up over the things I couldn’t get done.
So what did I manage to get done in August?
I successfully submitted five times (once per week) in August, thus achieving my goal. I also did some prep work for my short story submission challenge, which I’ll try to complete this month. I inventoried my current stories to see which ones are ready to submit, which need some basic revisions, and which need a rewrite. I also explored short story calls that will be open in September and decided which ones I want to try to submit to. For some of these calls, I’ll need to write a new story, so I did brainstorming around those calls and was able to outline the stories I want to write during September.
Once I finished doing that, I set up the spreadsheet I’ll use for tracking my submissions and planned out which stories I’ll submit to which markets during the first half of the month. I’ll do further planning as the month progresses, but I wanted to pin down my plan leading up to when I leave for the US so that I won’t be scrambling to submit stories while trying to get packed and ready to go.
I wasn’t as consistent with my revisions as I wanted, but I got far more done in September than I’d been able to revise over the previous three months. So, overall, I’m happy with how I did, and I plan to continue to do it a little bit at a time until I make it through the draft.
On to September
2022 marks the fourth year I’ll attempt to submit 30 times in 30 days. To be clear, I’m not trying to write 30 stories or submit 30 individual stories. In past years, I’ve submitted some stories up to 5 times during September, so I’m sure I’ll have some instances where I’ll submit one story multiple times.
This is the first year that I’ll be traveling and working full-time during September, so I tried to prepare more than I have in the past. I’m concerned that between work and travel, it’ll be all too easy to skip days, so I wanted to do as much as I could not to give myself an excuse not to submit (that seems like a super convoluted sentence, but I can’t think of another way to phrase it).
As for revisions, I’ll do what I can. My priority is submitting short stories, so I’ll take the revisions day by day. If I need to use more of my designated writing time for short story submissions, I will, but if I have designated time left over, I’ll use it to work on my novel revisions. That way, I won’t backburner my novel completely for September.
I’m not going to try to do anything more than that, so I guess that’s it for this monthly update. I’ll try to post a mid-month update, but that’s right around when I’m flying to the US, so we’ll see if I’m up for it.
Thanks for reading!
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