Quarterly Report

Despite all of the crazyness that goes with having three kids in middle and elementary school, three jobs (substitute teacher, sales associate, candy & dessert maker / partner), and the beginning of little league baseball & softball season with all three kids now playing, it was a productive quarter for my creative pursuits. And how? Well, through a mix of luck, discipline, and circumstance.

The luck comes from getting substitute teaching jobs where students are manageable, and the work assigned is mostly independent. Elementary school days are the least productive, with only lunch, and maybe a music or PE prep time to work. Middle school jobs theoretically give you more time, but require so much classroom management that there is never more than a handful of minutes to focus on reading or writing. High school jobs, unless they are PE or Special Day Classes are ideal.

And here Circumstance comes in, as I am fortunate to have been picked at one of my local high schools to be their permanent sub: meaning I go there everyday to fill in as needed, either on a class-by-class basis to give teachers an extra prep, or to jump in if a teacher has to leave early, or to fill in for a teacher that called in their absence last minute and couldn’t get a sub. The majority of classes at this particular high school are well behaved, and able to work independently, leaving me plenty of time to work at the writing game.

The discipline is still developing, but one of the things I have been working on to foster this is cutting out casual video games. Now, I love video games on the console and computer, and I find that many games offer intelligent storytelling and interactive experiences that I don’t consider time wasted. I’ve cut these out mostly because there is little free time at home to engage in these games. What I’ve discarded is the Candy Crush/Angry Bird/etc. type timewasters. Now whenever I have the urge to take a break I turn to ebooks on my phone, and am better at bringing a book for little league practices or work breaks.

So, with three months of 2014 already gone, here is a pause to evaluate my writing life so far this year:

I have read 10 books: 4 on audio, 1 ebook, and 5 ink-on-paper. They include some Mark Twain classics, some excellent indies, and some world-class genre novels.

So far I have failed at my goal about submitting short stories, having not put any out for consideration.

I’ve been a bit better about socializing online, but not as much as I should have been, so I’m going to call that a ¾ fail.

My novel writing is where I’ve seen the most productivity. I have added 16808 words to my literary zombie novel The Two Loves of Ugly Doug, 19792 words to my seriocomic novel about education and writing Diary of a Sadman, and 50 words to my satiric novel on sex and higher education The Great North-Southern Cock-Block, for a grand total of 36650 unedited words, for a daily average of 407.22 words. I had given myself a 250 words a day average goal, so ‘Way to go Me!’

For Quarter 2 my goals are to simply:

- keep up the reading pace.

- get those short stories out there already!

- keep getting words on paper (physical, or electronic approximations). I have raised my daily writing average goal to 350, because this is more accurate average number of words I put down in ink on one page of 8-1/4” x 11” college-ruled paper.

Good luck to you, good luck to me!