I have utterly no clue what I said I was going to do this month. I think it was said with the full understanding that if I hadn't mentioned Golden Fleece Press yet, it was already hovering in my work folder and therefor whatever I thought was going to happen was more or less slated for failure.

It's hard to say I failed last month, when I sit back and look at everything I actually did. Did I do the stuff I said I was going to do? Well...no. I'm pretty sure I did nearly none of it. 

Whatevs. It's a new month full of new beginnings. I opened a publishing company last week! Arguably with a crap-ton of help and the coolest business partner in the universe, but I digress.  So. Goals for this new month.

• Ignore the faintly horrifying number of blogs I am responsible for upkeep on and ACTUALLY DO THEM. I know, this one might be a little difficult. Still, moonbeams and stardust and all that jazz.
• Edits. For the thing that's my placeholder in this whirlwind snowball of doom. I have months, but given everything else I need months so...
• I am doing Camp Nano. Because you all know I am crazy and I said I wouldn't, but you all knew that was a lie. You did, come on, admit it. I'm writing content for projects to be announced later and I know for a fact at least one of them is going to be utterly unhelpful in the way that means a 25k word project decides to be ten books. So. I've got that to look forward to. 
• Plan out a blog tour. Because my professional life isn't full to the gills already.

Right. So. There's my July, mixed in with my birthday and my kid's birthday and two visits from my parents and one national holiday and...

I wonder if there's a floor on my attic. That seems like a legitimate place to hide.

I vaguely recall, a couple of days ago (alright, so it was nearly a month and that's how lost I am) that I was going to stop missing days, on this whole blogging thing.

I'll wait until you're done laughing.

We're getting closer to the point where I can be honest about that giant project in the background that's eating my life. Granted, I'm relatively sure everyone who actually reads this thing already knows about it...

But we're not quite ready for launch yet, and I'm keeping quiet until we are. 

It's Well Written Wednesday and since I'm allowed to talk about writing (spuriously) I'm going to talk about what it feels like to have an 'author's' life on the internet anymore. 

There are currently, on that nifty little panel that Google gives you to pick which username you want to sign in with, eight choices. My to-do lists in Wunderlist consistently exist about a half-step away from being utterly out of control. I am either responsible for--or nearly responsible for--four blogs, three twitter accounts, probably more like twelve email addresses if you count the non-google ones, one web forum I have utterly failed at for months, and three websites. Not counting the giant PROJECT OF DOOM I'm not actually owning up to yet I've got Nano, some involvement in First Book, my own writing career, a position as the Enrichment Coordinator for my son's school, the Book Lover's Bazaar coming up in September, and another nine and a half weeks as a full-time childcare person.

Arguably, at the end of all of that I should be talking about the impending crash, should I?

But I'm fine. Not even pretending at fine, I'm actually fine. Sure, there are moments where it feels a little big. Like tonight, when I signed out of Google for a second and got slapped in the face with way more directions than I needed right then. There's a sort of constant cloud of things that haven't made it on a to-do list yet swimming around in my brain, and I'm still having dreams about the PROJECT OF DOOM that basically equate to my brain getting caught in circles because I'm spending a lot of time staring at the same information is sixty different ways. 

Someone mentioned Camp Nano, next month, the other night and I just laughed hysterically. We won't tell anyone I was laughing because it should be 'oh god NO' but I will absolutely, I nearly promise, be writing something. 

Welcome to life as a modern writer. I'm decently hopeful it's not like this for everyone.

I went on a writing jag this weekend, and at this point I'm so spaced out I can barely string a sentence together verbally. It's spring, and I always do this in the spring. I'm good until about 40000 words, and then I start to forget which way is up and I lose all ability to function in the real world.

But I refuse to miss another blog post.

Which would be admirable, if I felt like I had anything to say. (It was seriously tempting to leave all the mistakes in that sentence, because it was spectacular.)


I think this is one of those times where I need someone to sit through my giant fangasm about what I've written and then tell me to turn it into something real. You know who you are. 

Right. So this Monday is a little more Miscellaneous than normal, and a little more self-indulgent to boot. Whatevs. 

I made a post a while back, about how stories start as snowballs. Tonight has been an exercise in reminding me that it's not just stories that start as Snowballs. 

Once upon a time, a few months ago, Lovely Kate who is in charge of the local arm of First Book and I discussed doing a joint charity thing, she as First Book and me as our local NaNoWriMo bit. At the beginning of the evening it was going to be a small intimate sort of charity thing (I'd call it a soiree, but I have self respect).

Now it's going to be this...

I'm still steeple-ing my fingers like a cliche villain. If things go according to plan there will be local artists and crafters and writers and book lovers and...

I have homework for this week, spuriously about finding event space and also about starting to knock up promotional materials. Can you guess how much of the rest of the stuff I'm supposed to be doing is going to happen? 

New projects are always exciting. 

I'm lazy, and it's my anniversary this weekend, so you're getting flash fiction instead of a post. And yes, I realize how close to not-friday-anymore it is. Shush.

Jaegar Deep Sea Class PerSub, Marianas 
Twelve years. 
Twelve years, three girlfriends, three missed weddings, one Christmas his mother still wouldn't let him forget, three diplomas, and more student debt than he could count. 
Thirty eight million dollars he'd begged, borrowed, and done everything but steal for. 3 million hours designing an entire class of personal submersible. Six test dives. Two late-stage redesigns. Three grant re-fillings. 
One hiatus due to Giant Squid attack. 
All for this. Because there was a door at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and he needed to know what was behind it.
None of it had prepared him for the truth.

Today's Sci-Fi Friday post is all about audience participation (I'm lazy, three times a week is harder than it looks).

So, it's the internet and rumors abound, and apparently every time I'm hard up for a blog topic we're going to hit one. Don't question. Today's rumor, spurred on by a certain XKCD comic, is that James Cameron found a door at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. 

I'm going to just stare at that for a minute, and bask in the fact it's under this license and I'm totally allowed to do that. Also, if you click on the comic it'll take you to the xkcd website where there are so many other comics and I don't even know where to start. 

Anyway, here's the audience participation part. Tell me a story (in summary or whatever) about what Mr Cameron found behind that door that I'm about ninety-percent sure wasn't there. I'll devise some sort of prizey thing for the one I like the best.

Edit: I'm not sure how legal this is, but I'm claiming it anyway. Anything down there in the comments belongs to and is the responcibility of the poster.

There are buds on the trees and birds on my deck (they like to torture the cat) and guys playing ultimate Frisbee in the field behind my house. I'm not sure I'm ready for it to be spring yet. 

So, way back in the annals of history (shut up, January was a long time ago, I have the attention span of a mayfly this time of year) I made a commitment to blog more. You can look at the list of posts under this one to tell how that's gone. 

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” 
                                                                                                                      ― Winston Churchill

I've got nothing more relevant to say than Mr Churchill up there. So I'm moving on. 

Apparently the general consensus on this is that you should blog three times a week, and not blog about writing because no one wants to hear(see?) you witter on about writing three times a week. I'm probably going to fail about that, because irrespective of what everybody else thinks the conversation is about, it's always about writing to me. I promise to do my best to make it interesting.

Are you ready for the schedule? 
 
As of this week, Monday's at Words and Wonderings will be Miscellaneous Monday. There'll be a post, hopefully it'll be fun to read, I'll figure out what it's about when I sit down and start writing it. Wednesday's will the Well-Written Wednesday. That's the day for book reviews, or my take on what's happening in the writing universe, or TV/Movie (of the content variety, not the 'he's so pretty' variety) pop-culture. And last but not least Friday will be Sci-Fi Fridays and I'll trot out the latest cool thing I've found (usually getting lost while researching) and probably talk a little about it's potential in fiction. 

If I miss these you're totally allowed to brow-beat me about it. 

See you Monday!
(Yes, I realize I'm an eternal optimist. Yes, I realize how annoying it is.)

PS--the title is borrowed from Robert Frost-- "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

Yeah, about that. Even when it's warranted and this year has been sort of...crap, I'm not particularly good at new beginnings. I could do a sort of 'year in review' thing but it would likely be a bit depressing. A lot of this last year was spent in hospitals or taking care of sick people. And it does sort of get balanced with the good stuff, with signing a book contract and getting to see my family a bit more than I expected and having a year with all kinds of new ideas. 

Normally I'm good at hope. I believe everything is temporary and Iife's going to get better. Maybe that's because I don't think too much about it, but either way... I've got nothing.

So I think maybe the best thing I can manage for this, is to accept I'm just not going to have anything profound to say about the New Year, and move on to making plans. Myself and some of my local Nano people are doing a Year of Creative Pursuits again this year, so I'm singing off with my goals for January. 

But first my goals for the year:

1. Make a blog post every week. (hahahah.)
2. Review the books I read on here, and manage one a month.
3. Finish the ridiculous self-pub project I've started myself on.
4. Finish at least one other series project. (hahahahhahahah.)
5. Do one 'creative' project a month (knitting, crochet, whatevs).

And now the goals for January specifically.

1. Finish re-drafting The Quiet Mine (this years Nano that kind of got away from me)
2. Finish reading The Cuckoo's Calling and blog it.
3. Finish the ridiculous Minecraft scarf and one of the other dozens of things I have on the needles.

Let you know next week how those are going :)

For some strange reason, every time I say the word 'plot' my brain thinks 'grave-site' Best I can tell this comes from me agonizing over the plot to my first novel at the same time my mother was calling me with information on the grave-site's she and my father had purchased and what their plans were.

That, or every October for the past ten years I've been agonizing over the plot I had but didn't like--or just flat didn't have--while everyone else I knew was agonizing over Halloween plans. 

So. It's October 2nd, Nano 2013 is officially off the ground (the website rolled over last night, and if you haven't looked yet you totally should, it's all shiny and sparkly still) and I'm thinking about plot creation, because no matter how many times I've done this I still freeze when someone doing their first Nano asks me where I come up with a plot from. 

The truth is I don't. Not actively, certainly not any more. Now I do things like try and sit down to write a short story and wind up plotting a ten book series. I watch a movie and think 'no, that shouldn't have happened, he/she/it/they should have done this' which you would think would lead to fanfic but rarely does with me for some reason. The plots just happen. All the time, certainly faster than I can manage to write them which leaves me scrambling, trying to get enough information down that I won't lose the thread. 

I fail. A lot (someday I'll tell you the story of 'Lionel Richie's Greatest Hits').

So it's nearing November and it's time to think novels. They seem big, don't they? No matter how many books I plot there's always a moment where I look at my outline and think 'I've got like half a plot here. Crap.' But that's the point of Nano, biting off more than you can chew and learning how to churn through it anyway. 

Which leads us here. Last week I was comparing plots and gritching about fictional people who wouldn't do what I wanted them to with a friend, and we realized something. Everything I write starts at a snowball moment. I think I remember a science show in the 80's calling it 'contact.' The point where everything happens. And more than that, it seems to be the way I see all stories. Maybe the snowball moment isn't the beginning. Maybe it's not even in the book. But to me, it's the point that means everything, and it's the point that directs where everything goes. 

This years advice, when it's time to plot that insane novelling (seriously, ten years and I still can't figure out if that should have two L's or not) adventure? Find a snowball and roll it down the hill. Give it a chance to surprise you.

And then come tell me about it, I love to hear about other people's creations.