Hopefully, this should make my babbling about word counts a little more accessible.  So, what am I writing these days, anyway?

Section One: Novels: WHY ARE THERE MULTIPLE ENTRIES HERE, DAMMIT?

Many of you know that I've got one fully written but unpublished novel up under lock and filter already: Running In Her Veins, which is a classic gothic horror story (please do not confuse classic gothic and goth) about a kidnapped girl whose kidnappers claim to be protecting her from her biological father -- the head of an order of immortal demon-bound assassins.
( A Stain Upon His HandsCollapse )

I'm really bad at summaries, and that one doesn't sound half as interesting to me as the work itself does, but at the moment I can't find better words.  There's blood magic, unresolved sexual tension, and morally ambiguous immortals having shirtless swordfights, okay?  One chapter is up and posted under lock and filter, viewable by request.  (All of these are viewable by request unless I note otherwise -- let me know if you're interested, and I'll add you to the filter and show you where to find it.

( The Hellion PrinceCollapse )

Then there's the newest project:  ( The Knight of the StarCollapse )

Short Stories

( Mutilation of the HermaiCollapse )

( TumulusCollapse )

Projects on the Back Burner

Too numerous to get into.  I'll get into it anyway, but not in this post.

ETA:  Gotten into here and here.

 Is anyone else going to the 4th Street Fantasy convention in the Twin Cities this year?

Still not re-enthused by blogging, alas.
This entry was originally posted at http://matt-doyle.dreamwidth.org/830310.html. Comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.

 Posted Chapter Thirty, if anyone's still reading.

I've still been entirely absent from this portion of the blogosphere.  Not writing, and sadly not reading.  It just hasn't caught my interest.  It isn't that I don't miss you all, because I do.  It's just that with depression and anxiety, I have to triage my time to get anything done, and this is one of the things that got cut.

Maybe as the weather gets nicer (and I get more productive as a result) I'll return.  I'd like to, certainly.
This entry was originally posted at http://matt-doyle.dreamwidth.org/829887.html. Comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.

 ... getting back into the habit of regular blogging has not been working for me.  I haven't been posting, and I actually haven't been reading, either.

I am curious about what is noteworthy in your lives, and I miss you guys... but I'm busy enough doing almost nothing elsewhere on the internet that I'm not missing the hours a day I used to sink into LJ & DW.

Still, if you've news, I'd be curious to hear it in comments, or be linked to the relevant posts.
This entry was originally posted at http://matt-doyle.dreamwidth.org/829238.html. Comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.

 1) Writing.  165,000 words by the end of the year, or ~450 words per day.  This is well within my capabilities, especially if I can get a good head start on productive days.  As before, no beating myself up about bad days or off weeks -- just looking for new ways to increase productivity.  No giving up.

2) Finish my current writing projects.  If I work at it I can have Hellion Prince done in March or April.   I have several unfinished short stories and some barely-started novels, too -- producing finished work takes precedence after chasing new ideas.  Even though my wordcount as over 120,000 last year, under half of that was on the projects I had made priorities.  If this emans more polishing and editing and less new work -- even less overall words -- so be it.

3) Get an agent.  Speaks for itself.  I'm not ruling out self-pub for some of my projects, namely Swansong, but I need to query Hellion Prince and Running In Her Veins.  I want them both being shopped around before I turn 29.

4)  Sell a short story at a professional rate to a legit publication.  I've had short stories published, and I've been paid to write, but never both at the same time.  Once Hellion Prince is finished, and my query letters are out in the wild, this is priority numero uno.

5)  Publish a gaming project.  Whether a LARP or the Periodic Tome of Elementals.  Whether self-pub or traditional.  I game too much not to turn it into a revenue stream.

6) Blog three days a week.  I burned out on five days a week.  Let's try this.  Low priority, though.

7) Track what I read / do the 50 Books POC challenge.

8)  Get my weight down to under 200 lbs.  That means losing three pounds per month, every month.  Not sure how I'm going to go about it yet.  I'll work out a plan, and I'll get it done.

9) Pay down my college debt.  In the last few months, a fierce desire to continue my education and return to academia has woken up.  Rather than a pie-in-the-sky plan to pursue a dream degree in an unforseeable future, in 2014 I want to go to a local grad school and get working on a Master's in English Literature.  In order to do that, I have to stay current on my loans, pay down about $4000 I owe directly to my alma mater so they'll release my diploma, and do the GRE.  I can do that.  Good TA programs mean that school itself will cost me between nothing and $3K/year, and I can manage that too -- paying my alma mater will be good practice.

10) Renew my faith.  It's been rather in crisis this year, but it's also been the most successful tool in my mental arsenal for battling my panic attacks.  Both as a practical and a spiritual matter, I want to reconnect the parts of my beliefs which matter most to me.  Maybe that means Bible study.  Maybe church attendance.  Maybe activism of a more secular kind, or writing sermons regularly (there are websites that pay you for that one).  I don't want to be too mercenary about this, but the fact is that my faith is a help to me.  Maybe a crutch, and maybe a ladder -- it's possible to see it either way.  But I have to pursue epiphany, not just sit and wait for it (unless meditation turns out to be what I need to do).

Anyway. That's the plan.  Ten resolutions.
This entry was originally posted at http://matt-doyle.dreamwidth.org/829076.html. Comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.

So the New Year's post that I just tossed up was my third post this year, but the other two never crossposted from DW.  Fixed that now.  Here's Last year's resolutions and my Yuletide Reveal.

 New Year's is usually a time of relative isolation & contemplation for me, making these reflection & retrospection posts really easy to write.  Not so this year -- in fact it has been my busiest New Year ever, surrounded by friends and activity -- poker tournaments, D & D one-shots, movies, board games, parties, -- clearly not a bad thing, especially when my seasonal doldrums have attacked early.

My life in general has been like that lately -- too amiable and sociable for me to be as creatively productive as I would like.  The doldrums -- the depression, the sudden onslaught of anxiety attacks that cropped up this year -- have been a factor as well, obviously.  I didn't do very well at any of my resolutions from last year.  By an objective, goal-oriented standard, this year has been an utter failure for me.

So thank God, I'm not objective, I'm not goal-oriented, and I'm not alone.  Nasty as my emotional roller-coaster has been, it would have been worse (and my productivity too) were it not for the light and bustle of friends keeping me cheery.

Resolutions coming shortly.
This entry was originally posted at http://matt-doyle.dreamwidth.org/828738.html. Comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.

 My resolutions last year:

1)  Blogging/Writing.  Continue blogging 5 days a week, but make an effort to get more interesting.  Write 550 words of original fiction every day.
2) Publishing/Gaming.  Start typing and self-publishing gaming supplements. 
3)  Track what books I read.  Both in order to review them, to complete the 50 Books POC challenge, and to appreciate my latest Christmas gift -- a 6 month subscription to Bookswim .
4)  Fitness.  As a first step toward getting in shape, I'm giving up soda again, cold turkey.  I'm going to try to reduce the amount of sugar in my coffee.  And once the weather allows it, I want to spend at least an hour a day walking.  
5)  Political aspirations.  All right, so I'm not going to be signing every petition that comes my way.  I can still pick at least one cause or current event each month that matters to me, blog about it, lobby for it, call my congresscritters, and see if there's any sort of personal difference other than rebroadcasting I can make.

Point by point, let's review:

1) I was steady in my blogging until September or October, and then more or less gave up completely.  I just didn't have it in me.  I've also mostly been microblogging on plurk.  Say, is there a plurk aggregate the way there's a Twitter aggregate?  Eh.  probably wouldn't use it, but I'm curious.

Bluntly, this is a failure, but it's one I don't really care about.  For whatever reason, daily blogging went from desirable to a chore to a touiil to flat-out abhorrent.  I would like to get back to occasional blogging, but daily?  Can't be arsed right now.

Writing.  I wrote 115,231 words this year.  That's far short of my goal, and it's short of last year... but it's still better than triple my wordcount in 2010 or any year before.  I can live with it.  When I post about my resolutions for this year I'll talk more about this, but in short, I'm not really disappointed in my 80,000 word shortfall.
2) Total fail.  I was too busy with other things.  This year, I'll just have to redouble my efforts.  I've sold my second LARP, locally, so I am making money for gaming-related pursuits, but this was still definitely something I fell down on.

3)  Like blogging, I did great for most of the year but I didn't stick with it.  This year, I'll try again.

4)  Fitness.  Well.  I've reduced the sugar in my coffee!  I walked... sometimes.  I'm back to drinking soda and unlikely to stop at the moment.  And I'm heavier and more out of shape than ever.  I'm not sure the New Years' Resolution model of goal-setting is helping me very much on this front, honestly, so I dunno what I'll be doing this year.  But I haven't given up the dream of getting under 200 pounds and a 36-inch waistline!

5)  I didn't really track this, but I was active, involved, and thoughtful over-all, and I got to work in canvassing again, which was as satisfying to my soul as it was punishing to my feet.

Still pondering how to handle it in the upcoming year.



Later today or tomorrow, I've got a new list of goals -- ten or twelve of them -- and some more reflective musings on the busy-ness of my life and the way my plans have changed and evolved.  I think I'm healthier (er, mentally) and happier now than I was last year, and I want to capitalize on that in ways that, since the cessation of my blogging daily, I haven't really told you about.
This entry was originally posted at http://matt-doyle.dreamwidth.org/828639.html. Comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.

 This year, I wrote Lemancholy, a supernatural thriller-ish thing set at the Villa Diodati.  Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Percy Bysse Shelley are my perspective characters, but I had to try very hard to keep Polidori from stealing the show, and every scene needs more Claire Clairmount (who I admire more the more I research her).  There's lots of debatably Unresolved Sexual Tension, stupid amounts of well-researched historical accuracy, and I think I tried to be fairly ambitious in my craft with this one, though I'm not sure I succeeded.

Anyway, I was very pleased to write it, and almost as pleased to present it with an annotated bibliography (something I wanted to do two years ago with The Knight of the Star, but couldn't, because I hadn't been organized enough and probably used upwards of forty sources).
This entry was originally posted at http://matt-doyle.dreamwidth.org/828262.html. Comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.

 Yuletide is live!  I received a Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya story called Not a Harlequin Romance, told from Yuki's perspective, and it is positively the cutest, sweetest thing I could have imagined.  Readers, I melted.  This entry was originally posted at http://matt-doyle.dreamwidth.org/827906.html. Comment wherever you feel most comfortable commenting.