On Deck, 2014

tyunglebower ♦ June 26, 2014 ♦ Leave a comment

You may have noticed that i didn’t post on Monday. Having posted on both Friday and Saturday as part of the official launch of Thank You for Ten I thought it best to take a step back from the blog for a few days, and meet up with everyone today instead.

I want to eventually give my initial impressions of the launch now that it is underway, and books are being sold. But I want to put some more distance between the launch and my post about same, so look for that probably next week.

Today I want to mention briefly what I’m up to next besides promoting  Thank You for Ten. (Posts about the promotion experience will certainly be written as time goes on as well.)

To begin with, I will return to the Open Letter Continuum next  Thursday. I commandeered in regular spot every other Thursday in order to talk up the launch and the prep leading up to it. Now that that has evening out, I’ll resume regular programming for those days, so keep checking back for those.

I’ll be tinkering with my daily schedule a bit, starting next week, so I can make time for various projects, large and small, that I want to get done by the end of the year.

For example I already posted recently about the future of Novel 2.

I also want to resume work on my stage play, which for the time being on the blog I will refer to as Five. Just before I started to final push on Thank You for Ten I finished up act one of this play. One of my writing goals is to complete a first draft by the end of the year. I’ve got some outlining to do before I start the actual writing. I know where I want the play to end up, and act 2, as for most plays, will be shorter than act one, but I’m not yet sure how I will get to the ending yet. And I also want to make sure I have some character development issues in there. I hate rushed scripts. So that’s Major Project Number 2 at the moment. (Novel 2 would be major project 1. It’s okay to be confused, as it hardly matters outside of my mind.) 

Then I have a robust goal of writing about 125 more short stories of various types by the end of the year. In some ways short stories are more difficult to complete than the longer fiction. I’ve said before that I’m behind in my writing goals for 2014, and nowhere more than in my short story production. I have a few ideas for literary pieces that I’ve been meaning to get to. And then there is my adventure series on Wattpad. That series is more for fun, and in theory was supposed to be something to work on at a relaxed pace with less pressure between more pressing short fiction projects. I think I need to be having more fun with them going forward.

I also intend to make good on a long standing promise to myself concerning my other website. Yes, I have one. It’s called Always Off Book. It’s my theater-oriented blog, and I’ve had it for nearly eight years. Each year of the last few has seen fewer and fewer posts, however. That’s mainly because I haven’t been in a show for about three years, and most of what I posted there related to my thoughts about rehearsals and performances. I didn’t think it would be that much time between shows; that is in fact a source of sadness to me. But I have resolved several times to begin writing more theater-centric posts there between shows. Articles that express my views and feelings on theatre issues, particularly for the actor. Advice for actors, responses to theatre posts I find elsewhere. I’m starting to collect such ideas and bookmark such posts online. Slowly but surely I’ve been posting there more frequently, though its reach has never matched that if this website in terms of followers. (The followers of that one are just as quiet and stingy with comments however…) So I hope to be writing on theatre matters more often.

On the subject of theatre, this isn’t technically a writing goal but I’ve written a one-man show that incorporates Shakespeare. It’s been written since early this year, but I still have to memorize it, and tweak it as I go. I can no perform act one without referring to the script. I’ll be working on memorizing act two in the coming weeks and months. Ideally, it would be performance ready for at least some kind of preview audience by autumn of this year.

And I hope to keep writing my form poetry. That, whoever, is under no specific deadline.

So that’s where I am outside of the book launch, in case any of you thought I was doing nothing else with my time and energy.

But I still want you to buy Thank You for Ten, either here or possibly here. You’ve got 99 cents someplace, and I’d be honored if you spent it on my short story collection.

What are you hoping to accomplish creatively with the rest of 2014?