Update on writing and life

I haven't posted in a while, so I thought I'd just chime in with an update on writing and life in general.

Things are as busy as one can expect with a newborn, but I've really been making the effort to keep writing as much as possible. (Note: I should mention that it helps to have such a supportive wife.)

I did learn something new in the last month and that is that the key to productivity in busy times is prioritization. There's only so much you can do in a day, so you have to pick the most important thing and let everything else wait for a while.

Since we don't have a lot of free time, I had to rethink my goals and priorities for the next few months. One thing was for sure though: Outside of family and work responsibilities, writing would remain a top priority for me, even if it meant giving up TV all together and (temporarily) cutting my workouts down to 2 or 3 days per week.

With a more limited schedule, I had to modify my writing goals a bit to adapt. I decided that since I wasn't having a tremendous amount of luck finding representation for the novel it might be a good time to step away from it for a little while and then work on another revision of the novel, the synopsis and the query letter.

On the other side of the writing world, I have been finding much more success with the short stories. I just received my fifth acceptance letter of the year so far, bringing my number of published or soon-to-be-published short stories dangerously close to ten. With that, I decided to focus on finishing and submitting short stories until I reach a minimum goal of both ten published and ten pending. After that, I'll go back to working on the novels, but until then, the queries can wait and if I miss an occasional blog post I won't beat myself up over it either.

In other site-related news, I have some other plans for this blog running around in my head that I might be trying in the next year. We'll see how that goes and I'll do an update about it sometime in the future.

So until next time, I just want to say that no matter how busy you are, don't let it keep you from chasing your goals.

If I can do it, rest assured that you can too.