Goals and Plans – Page 5 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Reading Resolution

My resolution last year was to read or DNF 100 books. I was doing pretty well on it through the summer, but then I stopped using Goodreads and lost count. (No particular reason, other than that I just fell out of using the site. It’s clunky and difficult to navigate, and after I started using my wife’s spreadsheet system for tracking my reading, I just didn’t feel like posting updates.) Counting children’s books, I definitely hit 100—probably more like 120—but without counting children’s books, it was probably closer to 80.

I do really want to keep up on my long-term goal to become a better reader—or to be more well-read, which amounts to the same thing. This last week, I’ve been giving that goal some serious thought, and I’ve decided on the following new year’s resolution for 2022:

Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all of the good ones.

Ever since 2015, I’ve been pretty jaded about the Hugos (and the Nebulas, to a lesser extent). However, for a long time they were the most important and authoritative awards in science fiction, and by using it as a reading list, I hope to get a better sense of how the genre has evolved over the years, including how in recent years it has fallen to the woke insanity of our time.

There are 110 novels that have won either a Hugo or a Nebula award (or both). Of those, I’ve already read or DNFed 33 as of today, January 1st. I anticipate that I will DNF many of the rest, but I’ll give them all an honest try, and differentiate between hard DNFs (where I know I’ll never get back to reading it) and soft DNFs (where I intend to come back to it later). For purposes of this resolution, though, I’ll count both, since as a reader I believe in DNFing early and often.

As for acquiring them, that shouldn’t be too hard, and will help to build our family library, which is one of my long-term goals. Paperback Swap is great for acquiring used books, especially mass market paperbacks, which is actually my preferred format for most books (great for stuffing in a back pocket or tossing in a backpack, and you don’t mind it as much if someone borrows and never returns it). The added benefit of using Paperback Swap is that it will help me to get rid of some of the books I’ve acquired over the years that I’ll probably never read.

That’s actually a huge problem for me, and I was thinking about making another resolution to have read at least half of the fiction books that we own before the end of the year, but I think this reading resolution will help with that enough that I don’t need to make it more complicated. I’ve found that it’s generally better to set one resolution and focus on that, rather than setting so many that I’ll probably forget all of them by mid-March. Besides, having a bunch of unread books isn’t actually much of a problem, unless you don’t have a place to store them. We do.

While putting together the spreadsheet of all the Hugo and Nebula winning books, I discovered some very interesting things. One of them had to do with the age of each winner at the time they won the award. The average age was about 46, with Samuel Delany coming in as the youngest for Babel-17 in 1967 at age 25, and Ursula K. Le Guin as the oldest for Powers in 2009, at age 80. (Her first novel to win either award was The Left Hand of Darkness, in 1970 when she was 41.) The average age skewed younger in earlier decades; now, it’s closer to 50.

Another very interesting thing to look at is which authors have had children and which ones haven’t. Of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels that I’ve DNFed, almost all of them are from authors who are childless. That’s not too surprising when you consider how much it changes your perspective on the world to have or adopt a child. What’s really surprising to me is how many of these authors are childless, and how many of the childless authors are writing books for children. Since 2015 and 2016 respectively, none of the living authors who have won a Hugo or a Nebula award for best novel have had any children of their own—or if they have, it’s not public knowledge and the internet doesn’t know.

So anyways, that’s basically the long and short of it. I’ll keep track of this goal through the detailed spreadsheet I’ve set up for it, and post updates throughout the year. And when I’m done with the Hugos and Nebulas, I’ll probably move on to the Dragon Awards, which may actually be harder since 1) there are more than half a dozen sub-categories, 2) many of the winning novels are the umpteenth book in a long-running series, and 3) I probably won’t DNF as many of them.

What are your reading resolutions?

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day Four

Words Written Today: 2,206
Children of the Starry Sea: 0
“In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight”: 2,206
Science Fiction from A to Z: 0
Total Words Written: 8,595
Total Words Remaining: 41,405
Total Words Ahead: 1,927

Really fun scene today in my short story “In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight,” which is quickly turning into a novelette or possibly a novella. Doesn’t really matter: I still plan to self-publish it in January, and I’ll call it a short story if it falls under 20,000 words. Most readers have no clue what a novelette is anyway.

Besides writing 2k words (which is now my standing daily word count goal), I finally published the short story “Lord of the Slaves.” I call it a short story, but technically it’s a 13,200 word novelette—but again, to most readers, it’s still a short story. It’s free everywhere but Amazon, which still requires you to go through a ton of ridiculous hoops to get it price matched, and now to get it in all the proper categories too. So that’s a pain. With luck, they’ll actually price match it in time for my newsletter next week, but either way, you can pick it up on my online store right now.

Four consecutive days of hitting my daily word count. It’s starting to get easier, though that may just have been this particular scene. With luck, though, I’ll be able to keep it up through at least the next week and build up a sizable buffer for when we visit family for the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ll be gone for almost the entire second half of November, so hitting word count is going to be a real challenge.

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day One

Words Written Today: 2,022
Children of the Starry Sea: 1,010
“Lord of the Slaves” author’s note: 1,012
Total Words Written: 2,022
Total Words Remaining: 47,978
Total Words Ahead: 335

I was going to do the same thing with nanowrimo this year that I did last year, and turn out 50k words of short stories, but at the last minute I decided to keep working on the same projects that I’ve been working on, and just write 50k new words in all of those.

The main reason for this is that I changed my own personal writing goals in October, to write 2k new words every day, and I’ve been struggling to hit that consistently. So I think that nanowrimo will serve me better if I use it to get better about hitting that goal (and the daily average for nano comes to about 2k words per day if you take Sundays off), rather than starting a new project.

Besides, I’m still quite excited about my current WIP, so there really is no need to prime or refill the creative well by starting a new project or working on a different project. That was the main reason I did the short story thing again for Camp NaNoWriMo earlier this year, and it worked out very well.

So anyways, today I wrote about 1k words in my current WIP, and another 1k words for the author’s note and acknowledgments of the short story I plan to release in the next week: “Lord of the Slaves.” This is one of the stories that I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2020, and even though it took me a while to fix it, I’m really happy with how it turned out.

I’ll also be releasing book 3 of the Genesis Earth Trilogy, The Stars of Redemption, but I’ve already done all the writing and other production work for that one. In fact, it’s already available for sale on my oneline author bookstore, and I’m currently running a free & $2.99 sale on the first two books in the trilogy: Genesis Earth and Edenfall!

All right, that’s enough self-promotion for now. Point is, I’m running a very agressive publishing schedule right now, which means I have multiple projects to juggle, not just my current novel WIP. That’s another reason I’ve decided not to complicate things by starting any new nanowrimo projects.

First day is off to a good start! Between Children of the Starry Sea and “Lord of the Slaves,” I managed to hit my 2k daily word count goal, which puts me about 300 words ahead of where I need to be. If I can keep this up, nanowrimo should be a cinch—but of course, that’s where things get tricky.

As with the other nanowrimos that I’ve done, I’ll post a daily update at the end of each day (except Sundays). Most of them will probably be shorter than this one. I also have plans to revive this blog and maybe start posting on other social media, but I’ll save that for another post, since this one is long enough.

Camp NaNoWriMo: Day One

Words written: 997
Stories written: 0
Total words written: 997
Total words remaining: 29,003
Total words ahead: 29

So after moving into my in-laws’ house to house-sit for them while they’re gone for the next 18 months, and hosting a ton of family in June when they came through for summer vacation, I’ve decided to get back into writing by doing Camp NaNoWriMo this month.

Just like last year, I’ll be doing short stories instead of a novel, only my goal will be 30k words instead of 50k. That comes to just under 1k words per day, which is actually a leisurely pace compared to a typical nanowrimo. But we’ve also got a lot going on this month, including new renters moving in, a family vacation with my in-laws, family from my side moving into the state (and needing help moving in), etc.

The first story I’m working on is actually an old trunk project of mine, that I feel I need to either buckle down and finish or else trunk forever. Part of that is because it’s about the breakup of the United States of America, which means that it’s going to feel extremely dated in another decade or so, no matter how current events play out.

After revising through about 1.5k words which I already wrote in the story (and which I’m not counting toward my camp nanowrimo goal), I put in about another 1k words and called it a day. I don’t think this story is going to be much longer than 4k words (maybe as many as 5k), so with luck I’ll be able to finish it on Friday. But the plumbers are also coming, and that has the potential to wreak havoc on the baby’s napping schedule, so… we’ll see.

At least things are off to a good start!

A letter to my 2019 self from my 2020 self

First off, before you read anything else in this letter, go and buy the following items:

A couple hundred N95 masks.
A box of 100 buckshot shells.
A Costco sized jar of vitamin C.
A Costco sized jar of vitamin D3 (50 micrograms).

Got that? Okay, good.

Second, don’t panic. You are (mostly) already prepared for what’s coming, and you’ve been expecting it for some time. And actually, things won’t be so bad for you, if you stay smart and take the proper precautions. Also, remember that the collapse isn’t evenly distributed, and everyone’s experience of it is different. You have positioned yourself and your family quite well to come out strong on the other side.

This is the year when the collapse—which has already begun, as you very well know—really begins to accelerate. Hemmingway said that bankruptcy happens in two ways: slowly, then quickly. Well, it’s about to get quick real soon. However, this is not the year when we finally hit the ground. Remember, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.

Enjoy yourself at LTUE 2020 as much as you possibly can, because you won’t be going to any other conventions anytime soon. In fact, don’t even worry about making a 2020 conventions plan. And your goal to read every issue of Locus Magazine this year? Yeah, you won’t be going onto campus all that much, so don’t worry about it. Besides, the February issue where they do the 2019 roundup is really the only one worth reading.

You really need to cut back on the political podcasts. Remember how, in your Washington Seminar internship your senior year of college, you learned that you actually hate politics with a deep-seated passion? Yeah, you’re going to be reminded of that before the year is up. At most, you should spend about 1-2 hours per day listening to political stuff, and maybe (though probably not) another 1-2 hours on current events and culture. But really, you should spend most of your time reading books, especially science fiction and fantasy.

Your in-laws are much better at home renovations than you realize, and are willing to help out generously if you ask. Also, you will save an important friendship (and a lot of time and money) if you rely on them instead of hiring on your friend as a contractor. Then again, you’ll learn a lot from that experience as well, and it’s better to risk losing a friendship than to risk stirring up bad blood with your in-laws. Do with that as you will. I’ve probably said too much already.

You are not a libertarian: you are an anti-communist. The distinction is important. Keep listening to alternative media channels, especially Tom Luongo, Chris Martenson, Tim Pool, Eric Weinstein, and Viva & Barnes (who you haven’t discovered yet, but soon will). They may be wrong about a lot of things, and their track record for predictions isn’t spectacular, but their hearts are in the right place and listening to them with a critical mind will give you the proper perspective more than anything else.

Pay attention to the UFO story. I’m not sure what’s actually going on there, but it’s probably more important than anyone realizes.

You have over-estimated the control that the powers that be have over our lives, but you have under-estimated the degree of their stupidity. Seriously, it ranks right up there with all the fools who turned World War I into such a magnificent clusterfuck. Possibly worse. Don’t put your faith in Trump—he is, at best, a speedbump to these people. Read The Fourth Turning, it will teach you a lot.

With all of that said, though, don’t be afraid. There is no reason to fear, especially if you are prepared. And you are prepared—not perfectly, but better than you realize. Most importantly, don’t let the craziness of the outside world keep you from all of the good things going on with your family. You and Mrs. Vasicek are going to have an incredible year, in spite of all the insanity. You will both become parents for the first time, with all that that entails. You will experience a lot of challenges, but you will lay the foundations for that strong and happy family that you’ve both always wanted to have. Recognize your blessings and thank God for them every day, and you will all come out all right.

Good luck, and God bless!

Your 2020 self

NaNoWriMo 2020 Day Twenty-Six

Words written: 2,682
Total words written: 39,545
Stories written: 6
Character interviews written: 4
Total words behind: 3,788

Catching up! Slowly, but surely. We’re in the home stretch now, and with just over 10k words to go, I think I may actually be able to pull this off. It’s gonna be close, but I may just be able to do it. Maybe if I also do author’s notes for the short singles I have yet to publish, hmm. That could pad things out.

Looking ahead, I’m going to revise and clean up all these stories before submitting them, probably at a rate of 1-2 per month. If I can use these nanowrimo stories to get into the habit of writing 1-2 short stories per month, that would be fantastic.

Thanksgiving went really well for us this year, but it’s late, and it seems that Mrs. Vasicek fell asleep while putting the baby down. Better sign off and go see to that.

NaNoWriMo 2020 Plans

It’s been a long, long time since I attempted to do NaNoWriMo. Usually, I have something else on my writing schedule which prevents me from taking off a month for another project. I think my last NaNoWriMo attempt was in 2013, but even then I was juggling that with another WIP, and the WIP won out.

This year, though, I’m trying something new and workshopping my current WIP, Queen of the Falconstar, through my writing group as I write it. Since I can only workshop up to 4k words per week, I’ve been lining up a sizeable backlog that already runs through the first week of November. In the next couple of weeks, I think I can line up writing group submissions through the whole month, which frees me up to work on something else.

Instead of a novel, though, I think I’m going to shoot for 50k words of short stories. My submissions queue has dwindled down to only four stories, and it looks like I’m going to end up publishing three of those in an anthology soon since they’ve pretty much exhausted the available markets. So I really need to write more short stories.

I’ve got a couple of stories planned, but not enough to fill all 50k words, so there’s going to be a fair amount of discovery writing going on. Hopefully that helps to throw my creative mind into a higher gear, which is kind of the point of NaNoWriMo in the first place: to show that writing under pressure can actually make you more creative. Since there are also five Sundays in November, and I make it a practice not to write professionally on Sundays, that amps up the pressure yet again, since it means that I need to write more than 2k words per day.

It’s going to be a challenge, and there’s a good chance that something will come up and I won’t be able to make it, but I’m shooting for it anyway. Wish me luck!

2019-11-07 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the November 7th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

One of the things I’ve come to really love about married life is reading in bed with Mrs. Vasicek. Right now, I’m finishing House of Assassins by Larry Correia, and she’s reading the Westmark Trilogy by Lloyd Alexander. She just finished the mystery novel A Better Man (making a few jokes about the title), and I just finished Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which has revived my perennial fascination with the Mongols.

It’s great to share a book with someone you love, but it’s also great to share the same space as the person you love while totally immersed in a book. Those are two different things. I’m also rediscovering how refreshing it is to end a long day by unwinding with a good book for an hour or two.

Reading stands apart from other leisure activities. Whenever I spend too much time on YouTube, or playing computer games, or doing something else involving the internet and a screen, I always come away feeling drained. Not so with reading. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.

Reading a good book always leaves me feeling replenished, like I’ve just come back from an exciting adventure, or come to the end of a perfect day. The books that stick with me always seem to have changed me in some way, even if it’s so subtle that I can’t tell how.

Unlike watching TV or YouTube, reading takes work. It isn’t laborious, but the act of reading requires just enough effort that when I’m tired or worn out, screens and the internet usually win out. But when I make the conscious decision to turn away from those things and open up a book instead, I never regret it. The same can’t be said when I come to the end of a YouTube binge.

It’s never too late to start a new habit or set a new resolution, but there’s something about getting married that makes it easier. So in an effort to read more (and finally get to all the books that I’ve accumulated over the last few years), I’m setting a goal to read two books a week. That’s 100 books over the course of a year, with a bit of allowance for unforeseen interruptions.

A hundred books sounds like a lot, but as a writer, it’s probably on the low end of what I should be reading anyway. Hopefully the quality of my writing improves as I do it. If I get into the habit now, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to make and keep that resolution for 2020.

What are some of the ways that you enjoy reading? With a spouse? With a pet? Alone? In a warm and quiet place? With a beverage of something tasty? Or maybe in a crowded place, with lots of opportunities for people watching?

I suppose there are just as many ways to read as there are ways to write, which is to say that there’s one for every reader. May you be fortunate enough to spend lots of time with yours!

Rethinking the blog

It seems that I’m constantly in a state of retooling my writing career, moving from one area to the next a bit like construction projects at a university campus. And every time that I start to retool something else, the blog gets neglected.

Well, it’s time to retool the blog.

A couple of months ago, I tried blogging every day to see how that would work out. Long story short: it didn’t. I found that I either need to focus a ton of energy on the blog, to build a consistent readership, monetize it efficiently, and turn it into its own thing, or else I need to downsize it into something that won’t drain too much energy or resources from all the other things that I’m doing.

I don’t want to get rid of it entirely. I’ve been blogging since 2007, and while I haven’t been consistent about it all through that time, I’m invested enough in it that I don’t want to take it down. The nice thing about blogs, though, is that they wait for you. They’re kind of like hobbies, in that regard.

That makes sense, though, because up to this point I’ve treated this blog as more of a hobby than an actual job. And I’ve never fully integrated the blog itself into my writing/publishing workflow, which is why I’m struggling to justify it now.

When I started the blog in 2007, it was mainly a vehicle to keep in touch with my writing friends (who all had their own blogs too) and encourage each other. Then, when I started publishing, it turned into a platform-building tool—a way to brand myself as an author. But it was never much good for promoting my books.

Later, as my politics began to change, I made the mistake of bringing those politics onto this blog. Then social media began to become really toxic for me, and I decided to pull back. I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, and consciously pared back what I posted to this blog. But politics was what I was interested at the time, so paring that back to avoid damaging my author brand meant that I neglected the blog even more.

In the last two years, I’ve focused a lot more on my email newsletter. At first, it was just a way to notify my readers of new releases. Then, I started doing free and 99¢ sales regularly, and it turned into a way to alert my readers of those. Now, it’s a full-on newsletter, complete with a featured book, a writing update, an author’s note with some personal thoughts and reflections, links to any group promotions I have books in, and a parting quote.

So what’s the point of sharing writing updates and personal reflections here, on the blog, when I’m already doing it on my newsletter? I suppose the blog has two advantages:

It’s a public-facing, searchable platform.
It allows for comments and discussion.

I was talking about this with Mrs. Vasicek today, and she asked if there was any reason why I couldn’t repost the content from my newsletter onto the blog as well. There doesn’t seem to be any harm in it. I don’t think my readers are signing up for exclusive content so much as to keep in touch with my books and my writing. Besides, some readers just don’t do email lists.

Other than that, I’m not sure what I’ll use this blog for. I need to put some thought into it. But if I’m going to downsize it, I need to turn it into a side feature of my online platform, not the main vehicle for that platform itself. That means I need to restructure this site, turning into an author site with a blog on the side, rather than a blog with some book pages on the side.

I’m not going away, though. I’m just retooling. The newsletter will be my main vehicle for sharing updates from now on, though I may do a long-form blog post from time to time. I may also experiment with blogging some of my books, or doing a blog series with the aim of turning it into a book later. If there’s anything else you think might work well, be sure to let me know.

A quick update

If life had a crazy-meter, the needle on mine would be somewhere in the yellow green right now and trending toward the red.

Next week, Future Mrs. Vasicek and I will be traveling to Iowa for my nephew’s baptism. It’s going to be a big family affair. Future Mrs. Vasicek has met everyone already, minus some of the nieces and nephews, but this will be the first time that we’re all in the same place together. Should be fun, but also very busy.

Next month, we’re getting married, and that’s a whole other source of craziness right there. Good craziness, but craziness all the same. Things are coming together one thing at a time, but there’s still a bunch of stuff to figure out, and a bunch of unknown unknowns as well. It will probably take at least a couple of months after we’re married before everything fully shakes out.

As far as writing goes, I’m making slow but steady progress on Edenfall, and should still finish it before the wedding. I’ll share more details on that in the email newsletter that I plan to send out this week, but the short version is that I seem to be over the hump and making good progress. That’s where I’m putting most of my energy, so if the blog falls off for a while, don’t worry—I’m still here.

As for the publishing side of things, I’m figuring out how to get all my books out in print, which was something I thought I’d figured out back in January until I learned just how crappy KDP Paperback really is. That said, it’s the best option for the present time, so I’m trying to figure out how to work within those limitations and design covers that their POD printers won’t mangle too badly. Still, it’s going to be a while.

An area where I’ve really dropped the ball is short stories. It’s been months since I wrote the last one, and I need to put a bunch out on submission again too. Also, marketing is an area that I need to do better in. I’m experimenting a bit with AMS ads, but it is so freakishly complicated that I hardly know where to begin.

But reading is an area that I really need to do better. I try to spend an hour or two each night reading, but the last couple of weeks that hasn’t happened at all. My TBR list is about three shelves long right now, and that’s just the print books. That’s definitely an oversight that needs to be rectified.

At the same time, I’m well on my way toward collecting all of the works of David Gemmell, mostly through Paperback Swap. If everyone has a superpower, mine is the ability to acquire books, so Paperback Swap is a really fantastic way to leverage that. The Neverending Story is my favorite book, but David Gemmell is my favorite author, so I definitely want to have all of his books in my personal library.

That’s pretty much it. Still need to figure out cover work for Edenfall. Still need to assemble my first readers and get stuff figured out for that. All of these are good problems, though. Hopefully, I’ll be trading up for better problems in the very near future.