Fail to Success…
Got A Number of Questions About That Statement…
Fail to Success… Most writers, when they set a goal like a page count daily goal, or a number of products finished, get stuck on the number and if they do not hit their goal number start repeating to themselves that they have failed. Horrid thing to do to yourself. Just horrid and very negative and leads to all kinds of other problems.
I do exactly the opposite. I tend to set goals that are product-finished driven. Number of stories, number of novels, books published and so on. I do not get into what will be in the stories or content or character or series because that brings in critical voice ahead of time. I just use the general form like a short story as the goal.
Say I set a goal to write twelve novels in 2025 and failed. I only wrote ten novels.
Listen to the stupidity of the statement “I only wrote ten novels.”
Writing ten books in one year is a total success. Totally, and most writers would love to do that.
So I set my goal at twelve and failed to success by only writing ten.
A few years back I failed on my short story challenge to write one-story-per-day for the entire year. I only wrote 145 short stories that year.
Of course that is more stories than most writers produce in their entire career, but I failed at my challenge. I failed to success.
It is all a matter of attitude.
I can’t set goals that I have already done and accomplished. I wrote five novels in five weeks once. I have done many months of a-story-per-day for the month. I have written a novel per month for a year many times. None of those are challenges that interest me.
Now I did publish 70 major books in one year during my 70th year on the planet. I might for my 75th year shoot for 100 major books published, but that is still a year away. But this year is 50 years since I sold my first two short stories, so it feels right to do something, some sort of challenge with short fiction.
I am tempted to give the story-per-day challenge a second go. And this time I will be doing something with the stories as I go, unlike last time. But still thinking on it. 24 novels in a year seems tempting as well.
We shall see.
AND DON’T FORGET…
For a few more days we have a fantastic Kickstarter campaign going for the Santa Series by Kristine Grayson.
And yes, electronic books will be sent to you on the 20th so time to enjoy them ahead of the holiday.
Check it out and check out the fun video Kris did. A lot of Santas.
(Might have to click twice to start it.)