Goal: Write Articles, start freelancing, and start work on new novel idea.

Sounds like great goals to me

Good Luck with everything Sean/Ian. What’s with the screen name change?

*I’m easily confused*

You're an inspiration, Sean. For freelancing, here's something that'll keep you occupied for a while: http://www.absolutewrite.com/freelance_writing/articles2.htm

There are also other websites dedicated to freelancing for magazines. www.writing-world.com is a goldmine.

Good luck!

A few years ago, I did a "submission of the month plan," to work on developing a thick skin. I vowed to submit something -- a short story, an essay, an article, a partial, whatever, as long as it was outside my comfort zone (i.e., submitting a legal document to an existing client didn't count) -- every single month of the year.

The idea was to garner twelve rejections, feel the pain and realize I could survive the rejections. Unfortunately -- or fortunately, I guess -- I got positive responses to the first half dozen or so, and then got side-tracked while doing revisions for a novel that ultimately was rejected, so I didn't finish out the whole year of submissions.

I might suggest scaling back your goal just a teeny-weeny bit, so as not to get overwhelmed and get behind, and then start beating yourself up for getting behind, and so on. How about committing, at least initially, to one submission a month (rather than a week), and after you've met that goal for six months or so, then ramp up the rate slightly. Susan Mallery gives a really great talk on "writing more while writing better," and one of the things she emphasizes is not to increase your quota too fast, or you'll get frustrated. The first step is just to establish a daily writing quota, whatever you can meet consistently, even if it's just a page. Do that for TWO WEEKS AT LEAST. Maybe three. Then, in the following week, add about 10%. So, if you started out with a 250-word quota (one page), the next week, your quota is 275 words. And, again, let that settle in for two or three weeks. Then add another 10%, and you'd be up to about 300 words. And so on. The thing is to do it gradually, let your body and brain get used to the new routine, and only then try to increase it. It sounds slow, and it's easy to get impatient, but over the long term, it works better than starting with a too-high quota and then getting overwhelmed. You may not have a word quota, but the same sort of principle can apply to other things, like the frequency of submissions. With freelancing, you'll want to be submitting more than once a month, but starting out at that productivity level may be overwhelming and backfire on you.

You can also commit, in between the monthly submissions, to other steps you can take, like, as you're already envisioning, getting and reading Jenna's book, and researching the market and perhaps collecting notes on subjects and so on. Those things take time, and are part of the process.

FWIW, I have a little year-at-a-glance calendar (made it myself from a table on my wordprocessing program, nothing fancy), and in each month's box, I have a major fiction project to work on, a shorter fiction project (for a break from the main project), a non-fiction project, a PR project, and the name of any of my stories that are being released that month (for the positive reinforcement), etc. They aren't quite formal goals, but it keeps the stuff in front of me that I'm planning to work on in a given month and helps me keep at least a little bit on track (since I'm easily distracted). And I love crossing stuff off when I complete it.

Just a suggestion.

JD

Those are great goals, good luck with them.

I wish you the very best, Sean

Glad to hear things are moving so well. All the best to you, Sean, and thanks for the explanation re your screen name - I was wondering myself!