I’m in the middle of a career shift right now. It’s a big deal for me, at least. That means I have a lot of stuff to do besides tinker on this (poor example of a) blog.

In the coming weeks I’ll be rolling out a new pen name as well as finishing up some of the stories I’m woefully behind on.

On top of that I have some other issues that are hogging all my time and attention right now. That’s life. Thanks for being patient. Expect more news as I get this all figured out over the upcoming days.

“Sir Yes Sir” by the Menzingers is a song I haven’t heard for, oh, 3 or 4 years? It used to be on the embedded playlist on my personal MySpace page. After I quit MySpace I totally forgot about them. I found it again today via related videos on YouTube. What a bit of kismet, right?

What’s MySpace, you ask? Oh. Okay. Never mind, then. Forget I said anything about it.

Anyways, it’s a great, rowdy song by a talented punk band. I’m gonna run out (as in, go to iTunes if at all possible) and see what sort of new stuff they’ve released since the last time I heard them

Oh, and in case nobody’s noticed yet, I could spend all day talking about music. I’d say I’m a bigger music geek than I am a writing geek. Well, life is short, so love what you love, you know?

It’s with a heavy heart that I’m abandoning my current posting schedule of “Every Wednesday and Sunday with odds and ends in between” for the more relaxed schedule of “Every Sunday with shorter posts spread out during the week.”

Right now I’m trying to work full-time on my writing, and to be honest, this blog is taking up too much time. It’s gotten to a pretty tricky point where I’m so mentally worn out from tinkering with the blog that I can’t write very steadily. I also am having trouble coming up with blog ideas on top of all the fiction I’m writing, so pretty much everything’s suffering.

So, for now, we’re down to just a once a week posting schedule. I think that’s fair. This blog is still in its infancy, and not very well known, so now’s the time for experimentation, right? I don’t really know the answer to that, but we’ll find out.

This is a list of, well, reimagined movie posters featuring famous movies if they were made in different eras with different actors. It comes from Behance but I found out about it from the Art of Manliness site. My favorite one might just be Richard Kiel as the T-800 in Terminator. Or else William Shatner as the lead in Avatar.

Ok, a few pieces of news because right now I’m wandering around the landscape of my mind, trying to get some form of short-term direction figured out:

1. I’m abandoning the ‘Impatience’ posts. I’m not really in the mood, and to be honest, the original one didn’t work out the way I had wanted it to. I’ll revisit the topic sometime in the future whenever I feel like it. It feels nice being able to say, “Screw the rules, this is my blog, and if I want to abruptly drop topics that I lose interest in then by Jove I will!”
2. I do however have an idea for a potentially caustic post about dilettantism (look it up, you culture vulture, you). Oh yes, you read that right. There will be blood.
3. What I really wanted to write about was the fact that my bone marrow donor card showed up in the mail today. I got on the donor registry through the Be the Match program which is run by the National Marrow Donor Program, or NMDP. They’re a non-profit based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is convenient since I live about an hour and a half south of there. Stalkers, take note.
   
   Anyways, I’m not good at plugs, and this isn’t really the right place for it, but at some point in the future I’m going to write a nice post on why you should at least think about joining the marrow donor registry.
   
   

Until then, I suppose I’ll get back to writing. Exciting things on the horizon, folks.

This is gonna be really short. I had wanted to continue the next part in my mini-blog series about impatience, frustration and writers but other engagements have gotten in the way and I won’t be able to until Wednesday. Hang tight!

After putting up the previous post I just realized everybody’s supposed to be protesting against the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, today by blacking out their sites and not posting anything.

I feel like some sort of digital strikebreaker. Sorry, guys and girls. I would totally join the anti-SOPA blackout but I’m a bit of a stickler for my blog posting schedule.

Just know that I dislike SOPA as much as the next freedom-loving internet citizen. Fortunately, this blog’s read by pretty much just me so I doubt there will be much of an uproar if I don’t go dark.

Fight the good fight, ya’ll.

“Time After Time” is a famous song by Cyndi Lauper. I picked this title because time is an important thing in the writing world, and this post talks about how dangerous impatience can be. Yes, I know, my criteria for picking post titles is incredibly shallow and non-critical.

I’ve been a professional indie writer for…wait for it…exactly a week and a half. Note that I’m counting the time since my first ebook went up, not all the weeks beforehand I spent designing my site; establishing Turn Publishing as an actual company, albeit a sole proprietorship; learning how to do covers, formatting and conversion; learning simple business and so on.

How far have I come in this week and a half? Pretty far, I’d say. I have 4 short stories and a novella up. Have any of them sold yet? No. However, there have been a couple views here and a couple downloads there.

Am I discouraged by this? Truthfully, yes, a little bit, which is why I’m writing about it. Didn’t anyone ever tell you writing about your hurt feelings is therapeutic? There. Now someone has. Just remember to read the rest of this post and don’t get too caught up doing article crawls on Mark Sisson’s blog. Trust me, Mark’s Daily Apple is rivaled only by TV Tropes in the ‘internet time sink factor.’

And I just posted links to both of them from the same blog post. Sigh. See you in a week and a half or so.

For those of you who are still here, you’re probably shouting at the screen:

“Calm the eff down, SoFo, you just said yourself it’s been a week and a half. Didja really think you’d be an overnight success?” Of course I didn’t think that, but it’s something we all hope for regardless of how realistic we try to be.

Of course, I’m not going to throw my hands up and quit. Remember, quitting is the only possible way to kill a career. As long as you’re writing, you still stand a chance.

When I find myself impatient or discouraged - whether I’m feeling discouraged because my 1 short story didn’t become an international bestseller and story of the year and has sold 0 copies yet, or whether I’m scared and confused trying to figure out how to build a website or file business papers or figure out an ebook conversion program or whatever - I like to sit back and use a sort of visualization to help me get through it.

Basically, I imagine that there’s 99 other writers following the same path as me and they’re all at the exact same step in the process - for example, they’re struggling trying to get their first ebook through Smashwords’ Meatgrinder software, or they’re scared about taking that next big step and registering their own sole proprietorship. Maybe they’ve put up a few stories and haven’t sold anything yet and they’re worrying that their writing is absolute shit, or their covers are hideous, or their blurbs are vague and boring. I remind myself that a good chunk of these imaginary writers will become too frustrated, desperate, impatient or lazy to proceed to the next step and they’ll end up giving up the dream, falling into obscurity and returning to the ‘real world’ of school, or a day job, or whatever. Then I buckle down and realize that I’m determined to not be like them.

This visualization always helps to slap me in the face and remind me what needs to be done, whether it’s spending a day learning new software or realizing that a week and a half is nowhere near enough time to judge a story’s success. This sort of clarity is summed up with a neat, anonymous quote I saw on a CrimeSpace thread a bit ago: “The path to success is littered with the bodies of those who gave up.”

Also, if you think that this visualization is pointless besides being a motivational tool, you’re wrong. Because there are a lot of people out there in the world right now who are following either the same or similar paths as I am.

They’re beginning writers who are exploring the resource rich, shrouded-in-fog indie publishing continent. The 99 companions I use as examples in my self-targeted pep talk may not be real people, but you can bet that they have their counterparts in the real world.

Basically, to be able to succeed, you have to be willing to trudge a longer distance and clamber through more obstacles than your peers. This isn’t always true, and some people can hit it big and become rich with little to no concentrated effort, but I’m not one of them and neither are you. Let’s be realistic, like I said.

So now that I’ve gone off on a mini-rant about staying focused and not giving up, I want to get back to my original point: patience.

Every new writer (and every new entrepreneur, artist and/or freelancer in general) should have a 3-year, 5-year and 10-year plan. Having this sort of plan can do wonders for your mindset if you’re realistic (I know, I shouldn’t be one to talk about realism) and stick to them. I’ve found having a long-term vision can help combat any blues that might arise from the impatience bug.

Do you want to know what my 3 year and 5 year plans look like? You sure you wanna know? Fine.

My 3-year plan for my writing looks like this:

• 312 short stories written.
• 72 novellas written.
• 36 novels written.

From the above numbers I will also have 31 10-story short story collections, 62 5-story short story collections and 36 novella twofers (combo packages which include 2 thematically related novellas for the price of a novel, and yes, I know I need to think of a better name for them).

These will be spread out with the majority being self-published. I can’t plan for legacy publishing because being published is generally outside of your control - all you can control is writing and submitting - but I would like to have a nice chunk of my short stories in ezines, anthologies and such, and if I get a novel or two traditionally published that would be nice as well.

You’re probably shaking your head in disgust and disbelief wondering how I’m going to accomplish such a super-pulp output. Come on, haven’t you read about my bizarre and most likely impossible challenge?

Anyways, that’s my 3 year plan. My 5 year plan numbers look a little different because the Impossible Challenge is only set to run for 4 years. In Year 5 my output will drop considerably compared to the levels I’m writing under the Challenge. Someday I’ll go into further detail as to why the Challenge only runs for 4 years and what my career will look like 5, 10, 15 years in the future.

Other writers, even the sane ones who wouldn’t dream of this level of output, need a plan of some sort. It’ll help keep things in perspective and you won’t feel as depressed and helpless wandering from day to day, trust me.

By the end of the Challenge I fully expect to be making a handsome living with my writing. Hell, I fully expect to be able to live off my writing income alone by the end of 2012. I won’t be making a lot but I’ll be making enough to support myself so I can write full time and not work a day job.

Do I know if that outcome will actually happen by January of 2013? No. But right now I’m unestablished and all I have is reckless confidence and some gigantic aspirations, so I’ll stick with it.

I’m going to end this post here. In part 2 I’ll talk about the only way to kill a writing career, and I’ll talk more about my personal experiences with impatience and why it’s been so dangerous for me. Stay tuned for the next installment to show up on Sunday.