The Best Way to Overcome Those Post-Christmas Blues

by Jeff Goins

This is a difficult season, the week after Christmas. It’s a mini-season of limbo, an awkward in-between time, and people have different ways of dealing with it.

Some are still running on fumes from the emotional high that opening presents and seeing family brought. They may even try to extend the holiday an extra week, with varying degrees of success.

Others feel guilty for over-indulging in holiday sweets and are on a weeklong shame fest. They are already starting to make those New Year’s resolutions.

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The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #329 -- In Five Years

Where do you hope to be as a writer in 5 years?

I'm going to have to answer this one 2 ways. It all goes back to when I was a corporate chair monkey, and each year, I'd have to turn in my budget along with my realistic goals and my dream (or push) goals. So I'm going to do that here too.

Realistic goals:

1. Having a few novels under my belt, I will be focusing on novel projects and publishing far fewer short stories.

2. I will have at least 4 more comic book projects from reputatable publishers either in the production or already published.

3. I will be a more fit writer physically, and because I was able to take control of my health life, I will find that I'm more able to take control of my writing life (scheduling, persistence, etc.) as well.

Push Goals:

1. I will have in development one novel with a major house, not because I expect to get rich of it, but because it will help me build my platform as a writer from which to increase sales across the board for all my body of work.

2. I will reach a point in my writing career in which I can achieve a sustainable income by writing alone. Not a fancy income, but a sustainable one that alones me to be a full-time writer and keep the bills paid.

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #299 -- My Writing Goals (Or introducing Sean 2.0)

 What are you goals as a writer?

My writing goal for this year is to finish up all my short story and novella commitments and then next year not to write any short stories at all -- just to focus on novels and a few digest novels.

Why? Two reasons, mainly.

The first is that I have so much to offer on my table when I go to a convention that I'm crossing over into other writers' tables too. When five of us offer the same books, how is one to make any money to justify the trip to one's family? I plan to eliminate all the multi-table stuff from my convention table and then focus solely on work that is completely my own period. I'll still stock my short story collection, novels, and digest novels, but not the books in which I'm one of a group of writers. 

The second thing this frees me up to do is to work on crime/mystery novels for my own imprint with a mid-publisher and three mainsteam novels that I hope will be more marketable to the publishing business at large. (Or paying short story gigs. I'll always have a place in my schedule for a job that's pays upfront or even upon release -- just not so much space for back-end jobs anymore.) I enjoy writing for small and medium presses. I really do. And I will continue to do so as my time permits, but it's time for me to get serious about my career as an author. 

I have a vast network of connections and if I had the work ethic up to this point that I should have had as a writer, I should be a heck of a lot further along than I am now. In addition to the small and medium press work, I should have at least three books that I'm shopping around to mainstream publishers who can perhaps make my "brand" more profitable. 

A buddy of mine (thanks for the kick in the butt, Frank) posted something online the other day about how we get what we have worked for and that all the inspirational quotes in the world won't change that.
So this is it. This is me taking that advice to heart and making a change in my writing career. 

If I owe you a story, you'll have it before the end of the year, and many of you prior to that based on deadlines. But once that's done, I most likely won't be joining any anthologies for a while, except for a project that just really resonates (or characters that I own or co-own -- you know who you are, Rick Ruby and Spy Candy) and that I can work in to my paid and novel writing schedule. Of course, for those characters I'll most likely be working on novels or digest novels already, so that might be a moot point in all actuality.

Get ready for Sean 2.0 (or 4.0 or whatever we're up to now). He can't wait to be unboxed and let loose on the world.