I can finally see and feel the ending of “Child of Iron, Goblet of Fire.” YAY! I really shouldn’t have kept saying , “I want to have it done by the end of the year,” because it became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
I have one or two scenes, and then an epilogue, and I’m done. I hope to get at least the scenes done today (I think it’s going to be two, honestly; one set up and one payoff), and the epilogue during the week.
Also during the week, I want to finish the series bible I’ve been working on. To be fair, the author of the book I’m doing it for has had a more chaotic year than most of us, and I’ve been poking her for several months because she inadvertently sent me an incomplete manuscript to work from when I first accepted the assignment.
I’m hoping that I can negotiate with her so that in lieu of cash for my work on the bible, she’ll give me an hour or two of her time to talk about and/or do covers for a couple of my short stories. Ideally, I’ll get templates from her to use going forward, but that’s a negotiation we need to have.
Looking forward, I have two fanfics in progress that have significant starts (40,000 and 25,000 words) that are kind of niggling at me, and the one scene from a potential sequel to “Ad Astra” has been poking at me for a while. (Poking, in this hierarchy, is more demanding than niggling.)
And yet…
And yet, I’m feeling *really* drawn to the Bradbury Challenge (basically to write a short story a week for a year). I have enough story prompts to fill a year’s worth of stories, and even if I didn’t, coming up with stories has never been a problem for me. Finishing them, though…that’s been a challenge, at least when it comes to original fiction.
My only challenge with taking the Bradbury Challenge is that I’m notorious (in my own mind, at least) for setting goals and not following through. Why? Because there are no consequences, firstly, and secondly, because I really can’t think of rewards that I want that are commensurate with the challenge/goal.
Let’s take the Bradbury Challenge as an example – a working example, to be sure, because I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
The challenge is 52 stories in 52 weeks. At the end of it, I’ll have 52 stories and a to-be-determined number of story collections that I can publish. Let’s say 5, just for simplicity’s sake; it could be as high as 10.
…so? I mean, that’s cool and all, but it doesn’t feel real to me.
I’ve thought of giving myself a dollar amount for each story finished – $1.50 per, because that’s the minimum gross profit if I sell one copy of a short story. At the end of the challenge, that’ll give me $78 as a reward.
Without meaning insult to anyone whose circumstances are different than mine, and in full recognition that I am blessed in many ways … $78 is not a big inducement for me. That’s a few hours of overtime – which I avoid as much as I can because I prefer having more time than making more money.
But while $78 isn’t much of an inducement, I can’t justify giving myself, say, $15 per short story ($780 for the year), which would be a significant inducement. Why can’t I justify it? Because I’d have to sell ten copies of each short story to make that amount, and that could easily take longer than a year.
I’m further not helped because there aren’t that many things that I want – physical things or otherwise. In fact, I’ve been struggling to figure out how to spend an Amazon gift card my boss gave me for Christmas. (I think I’ve settled on a complete set of a particular TV show, but I still haven’t entered the gift card info to actually buy it. Go figure.)
So, what’s left? The only thing I can think of is disconnecting the monetary reward from the value of the finished product, setting it at, say $500.
Honestly, that kind of offends my thrifty soul – and would result in me having even more money that I wouldn’t know what to do with because I don’t really want many things.
And, just now as I write this, I have a *DUH* moment of epiphany: $78 isn’t much, but it’ll buy shares in an ETF that will earn interest/dividends that, reinvested, will help pay for our retirement, which looms closer year by year.
So: if I complete the Bradbury Challenge in 2022
, I will invest $100 in CHW, EXG, or GOF. (By way of full disclosure, I already own shares of all three; this is not to be construed as investment advice because I’m not a financial planner of any sort.)
Posting the goal here is a form of accountability, which I’ve heard is also good for helping achieve goals.
