2022 Plans
(cross-posted from my blog, Everything but the Stories)
Remainder of 2021: Echoesverse
You may have noticed my posting days shifting over the last two weeks. In fact, it probably looks pretty erratic from the outside. What you're seeing is me gradually moving into my new schedule, hoping to be settled into it by the turn of the year. Echoes of Beljoxa and Christmas at the Folly will finish out 2021.
Mondays in 2022: Offsite Day
The Ring Talks will be posting on West of the Storm, at a pace of one chapter per week, as previously planned. I've only changed the day for it. Any additional stories that might land there or elsewhere on the net will be tended to on Mondays, as well. The weekly blog entry is also being scheduled for Mondays.
It sounds like I'm piling a lot on a single day, but I'm not. I'm months ahead on the RT rewrite, so all I'm committing to on Mondays is spending five minutes getting a chapter up. Blog entries are frequently written a couple of days ahead, and scheduled to auto-post. I don't even have to log into the blog on posting day, if it suits me. Anything else that goes up on another site will be occasional work, not weekly.
Wednesdays in 2022: Wordpress Day
Wednesday will be the primary posting day on myrabeth's fanfic. I have six solid months of material completed and fully prepped for posting, in addition to another six months of material for one WIP, and who knows what progress will be made on others, to slide in between.
Expect to see chapters from Scattered Echoes: Second Generation, The Slayer's Ace, Last Days of May, The Other Side of the Door, The Roman Reunions, and more.
Fridays in 2022: Flex Day
So far, I've planned my weeks in 2022 to more or less move at the same pace as 2021: two chapters and one blog per week. That's all I'm committing to, because I know I can manage it. The real differences in 2022 are the venue for one of the weekly chapters and the flexibility I'm working into the plan, to encourage me to do more, but in an orderly way.
It was easy enough to put "and anything else that comes up" into the plan for offsite posting. That requires very little of me in the moment or in terms of planning. Additional blog entries and extra chapters I might want to put up? That's different. Theoretically, I could just throw something extra up whenever I feel like it, but how easy would it be for such moves to make my schedule look erratic to readers, or just throw off my routine-driven brain enough to mess up my standard schedule? Yeah, recipe for disaster.
So I'm giving myself Fridays to play with, for both my personal archive and my blog. If I've had a super productive writing week, and am eager to share the progress, I can put up an extra chapter on Friday. If I want to put up an extra blog entry because I feel like talking or just want to share something I've found online, Friday is when I'll do that. And if I just completely shut down creatively, or get crazy busy on a given week, Friday is an option, not an obligation.
The point is to encourage myself to post more content, without putting any additional pressure on myself when it may be detrimental, especially as we've already slid into the cold and dark part of the year, when I have to fight with my own brain chemistry so much more.