Of years ending and beginning...

Okay, so it's been a while again. I'm so glad no one reads this blog, so it doesn't matter that I haven't posted on it :-)

The year is ending, and since I didn't set targets this year, I'm perfectly fine doing a consolidation because everything I did is bonus compared to an expectation level of zero, right?

First, the speculative fiction writing stats of the year:

New stories written: 10
Stories submitted (some are submissions of the same story to different markets): 33
Stories accepted: 5 (2 in pro, 1 in semi-pro, 2 in token) (3 accepted on first sub, 1 on second, 1 on sixth submission)
Stories published: 4
Current stories out: 2
Other milestones: Met the SFWA pro requirement and joined up.

I have not made any submissions to markets since August end, as I used September to write some fresh stories, and I just didn't have the energy to polish up stories for market-fit shine and sparkle.

Around end of September 2010, due to some challenges on the personal situation front, I sat down to examine my approach and decided that I was splitting myself into more parts than Voldemort would have dared to do. I was often thrashing between tasks and managing none. It was time to decide on a focus given that my time availability was rather poor.

In my writing kitty, I noticed, lie over 30 stories for which I had a good set of user comments to process; putting up more stories for crit just to gather yet more comments made no sense till I processed the existing stories and either polished or trunked them, or decided "why" I needed more comments on them. In my ideas file lay over two dozen unwritten story-germs...

Fact is, my "productivity" and "creativity" are both low while writing speculative stories, and that my returns-on-investment in writing fiction are low because I haven't worked enough on (1) freeing my mind for the "creativity" front and (2)internalizing craft elements for the "productivity" front, such as sentence structures and selection for editing. I realized that I needed to step back in my writing and work on these.

A major direction of my life is working for caregivers of dementia patients, and in this area, my return-on-investment for time spent is relatively better. At least, I get a sense of connection and a sense of helping someone, even if it is just one or two persons.

Around September 2010 therefore, I started work on a comprehensive online resource for caregivers for dementia patients, in the process learning more about websites and even drawing, in addition to meeting more people and stuff like that. I made more progress on this front than I had expected, but less than what I had hoped. The site, Notes for Dementia Caregivers, involved a lot of writing, too. And I made some cartoons for it, using free software packages like GIMP and Paint.net...

Now a new year is dawning. Like last year, I am not setting any targets. I do have directions, but these are more on my "state of mind" than on countable achievements.

But there is one commitment that I made last year and hope to meet this year, too. That is, every day of January, I will be making one blog entry in my other blog, swapnawrites. I'm not going to sacrifice my first-born for it, but I will try...

And maybe I'll post more often to this blog, but that is not a commitment :-)