Remember the 8-Hour Book Challenge I described a few days ago? Today Konrath posted the achievers, and you can find them here. (Check them out; you might find something fun!)
Even before Konrath’s post went live, however, Smoke and Fears somehow started climbing the chart, and it’s reached #13 on Amazon’s Free Historical Fantasy list. Which is pretty cool, even if temporary.
Oh gosh. Hold on a sec and let me catch my breath.
Okay, author J.A. Konrath wrote a post on (among other things) maintaining the joy of creating without fussing over commercialism or perfectionism, and he ended with a challenge to create an entire book in just 8 hours.
That’s the entire book project. Writing, revising, formatting, creating a cover, and publishing. Complete.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
So this morning was the 5K run to benefit International Justice Mission, combating modern slavery. (Yes, real slavery still exists today. In higher numbers than ever, in fact, but thankfully also as a smaller percentage than ever.)
What you have to know is that I don’t run. Really. So this was a really good cause for me to even sign up. I had planned to do at least a bit of training beforehand, but a rotated pelvis nixed that. And that’s my best excuse for why I was able to take a photo of a six-year-old in front of me in the pack.
It’s a great time to be a writer, because we have more choices in how we conduct our careers: traditionally-published, self-published, or a hybridization of both? But with the freedom of choice comes the weight of having to choose.
A while back I wrote a humorous post about goals which would let me know I’d “made it” (whatever that means) in my writing career. Since then I’ve passed some pretty impressive personal milestones, and while I wrote that post primarily for my fiction writing, it would be wholly ungrateful of me not to acknowledge the great things which have come my way thus far in my non-fiction work as well.
Sometimes we achieve goals we didn’t even mean to set, and it’s good to find the joys of these surprise achievements. So here are some awesome things which have really happened, some of which I hadn’t even thought of as goals until I was delighted by them.
It’s good to have realistic expectations as well as goals, right? And likely goals as well as shoot-for-the-moon goals, right? Authors — and everyone — should have many small goals as they make their way toward large goals.
So in a fit of procrastination from Real Work, I’ve compiled a just-for-fun list of things which would make me happy, small or large signposts on the way toward Arrived — wherever that is.
