Author: Kirstie Olley (Page 2 of 37)

I really don’t want to write this one, because I’ve done so little. But when you realise how much I had to work around it’s surprising I got anything done!

I finished reading all of the Deep Editing lecture packet from Margie Lawson (though I’ve not applied it to ALL of Nothing Charming yet, only what I’ve edited so far). Speaking of Nothing Charming, I’ve edited a further 22 pages using both the Deep Editing class, the four beta readers’ feedback and my own nous. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but I only had access to a computer for ten days this month, and most of those I was working the day job, packing, cleaning, and critiquing other peoples’ work for the Vision Writers meeting this weekend.

To break down how I went with my goals directly:

• Proceed with edits on Nothing Charming: I did 22 more pages. Progress FTW
• Percolate some flash fiction ideas while driving on the holiday: I had two ideas while away, but I don’t know if they’ll end up being flash, they might be more my usual short story length ;p an idea’s and idea though, length doesn’t invalidate that in my opinion.

I might have managed to edit a few more pages of Nothing Charming, but I recieved a nice rejection back for Mermaid In A Jar so edited that story both with the feedback from the rejection and with the Deep Editing course. I’ll do one more read through later today and submit it to the next publisher.

bonus points for the skink in the bottom left hand corner

The massive time suck was the road trip to Sydney. While it was no good for my writing and editing it was super fun in general. I also got to see a lot of baby (or at least immature) birds that I’d never seen before. I saw baby peacocks with their peahen mother, and an immature bush turkey (it was so small and scratching up his little mound already uber-cute!). There were kangaroos at every campsite, some sidling right up to our tent. We also met some super friendly possums and land-on-your-arm lorikeets – and those are the wild animals! We also went to Taronga Zoo and the Sea Life Aquarium (dugongs!).

As much as I goaled low for February, I need to make up for the lost time. Here are my March goals:

• Complete edits on Nothing Charming (and maybe convince friends and family to chip in for a professional edit for my birthday ;p )
• Prepare the plot outline for ‘The Handrell War’
• Write two new short stories
• Get all my back catalogue stories back out there. At the end of last year I fell seriously behind and I hate sending out stories that haven’t been self-edited between each rejection – you never know what I learned while they were out and what I’ll catch on a fresh read
• Read through the current Written by the Stars draft, lift plot points, rework with Story Equation to create new plot outline for use in Camp NaNo in April

Yes I *know* I keep saying ‘no more NaNoWriMo’, but its a checkbox on the Five Year Best Seller course, and I don’t want to skip any steps.

And lastly, a stretch goal of:

• Edit Lovely/Lonely

The list’s a bit long, but I’m confident I can handle it, especially with Harley at kindy an extra day a week to meet the minimum attendance requirements.

Lastly, for those who want to know, here’s the books I read in February:

• Storyteller: How To Be An Audio Book Narrator – a great primer I’m hoping to make use of this year
• Atomic Habits – another good habit book. I can guarantee I’ll be rereading it again in the next few months
• An Ember in the Ashes – a very cool fantasy, love the ‘masks’ concept
• A Torch In The Night – hoo boy, that twist y’all
• Reaper at the Gates – don’t bother reading my review, the book is good, my review is not
• King of Scars – an awesome political intrigue book with serious inner demons
• In An Absent Dream – I love this series so much.
• Bloom – a sweet graphic novel about baking and boy love. Yuri on Icing ;p
• All My Darling Daughters – a manga one shot looking and women and their relationships in Japanese culture
• The Calculating Stars –  I re-read the audiobook with my husband while we drove(and drove and drove) on our two week road trip.
• On Writing – re-read this writing craft classic

January was busy. Here in Australia this is summer school holidays, so I had both the kids at home all but literally the last three days of the month. On top of that I helped T-J fix some of our sagging ceilings in the house (he did the nastiest part of the work, the climbing in the roof during searing Australian summer days!), and also installed a new car stereo, which ended up being a much more complicated process than I’d at first anticipated (whatever happened to plug n’ play?).

There was good stuff too. Xander’s birthday is early in the month, and we took him to Paradise Country where they currently have all sorts of cool Shaun the Sheep stuff including a stage show, statues, meet and greet ect . You can probably guess we bought him quite a bit of stuff at the gift shop there too.

But you’re probably here to see how the writing is going(and whether or not I’m working on the story you want to read ;p ).

I set three goals at the start of the month and here’s how I went with them.

• edit and resubmit several of my ‘in circulation’ short stories: I got two more back out there, but have several more I need to hurry up and get around to
• compile beta feedback on Nothing Charming and complete edits using the Deep Edits lecture packet from Margie Lawson: It’s a longer path than expected combining four peoples’ feedback, your own new ideas, AND the advice from a course all at once. Also, school holidays >.< I’m just a little over half way done page count-wise, but previous experience tells me the ending often requires the most work, so time-wise I’m probably not really halfway done, but it’s hard to accurately guage.
• compile beta feedback on Lovely/Lonely and commence edits:. I don’t like to be editing two things at once, too much risk of mucking up, so I haven’t even touched this.

So one completed, one half way done (approximately) and the other untouched. Not too bad considering I knew I was setting the bar high. It might come as a surprise, but I really didn’t waste much time at all on Ragnarok:Eternal Love. I did have a bit of fun, and can see myself logging in every now and again, but I’m not addicted like I was to the original. I don’t know if it’s me, the platform, or the game.

My February goals are going to be pretty skinny. I’m on holidays so almost entirely AFK for two weeks, plus don’t forget the sort of planning and fall out such a big family trip has. And most of the first week of February I’m working lots of extra shifts at my day job while various bosses take their accrued days in lieu from the Christmas period. I’ll be lucky to get one productive week out of February, and I’ll probably spend most of that doing my feedback for the next writers group meeting >.<

So my February goals are:

• Proceed with edits on Nothing Charming with an aim to ideally complete them(but the knowledge I probably won’t)
• Percolate some flash fiction ideas while driving on the holiday(there will be much driving ;p )

I’ll shoot for the stars again come March ;p

I plan to share some views on some anime I’m really enjoying in the next few days, and I might share some stuff from my big trip too, so hopefully more blog posts between now and my next goals round-up (which was totally my modus operandi last year ;p )

And for those curious, here are the books I read in January:

• The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy – A cool book about a Victorian era(ish) young woman who intends to be a doctor. Also yay for Ace representation
• Write Every Day – A good book about busting through mindset issues and analysing and structuring your day to get more writing done
• The Dip – An interesting short read from Seth Godin about how quitting can be beneficial and how to gauge when to quit and when to stick. I actually read it twice ;p
• Drawing on the Power of Resonance In Writing – A good short read on how resonance can be used as a draw in stories
• The Wicked King – The sequel to last years first five star read for me, unsurprisingly my first five star this year ;p
• The Successful Author Mindset – When am I not listening to Joanna Penn ;p
• Using Myth To Power Your Story – A lecture on using the Campbellian monomyth in writing
• The Hate U Give – a powerful story, definitely worth the read
• The Lovely Bones – ferocious olives is the most hilarious metaphor for dilating pupils ever
• The Good Girl – not so good a book sadly IMO
• Children of Blood and Bone – a fascinating African based fantasy
• Enna Burning – the follow-up book to The Goose Girl which I read and loved back in 2017
• River Secrets – The third book in the Books of Bayern series(The sequels to The Goose Girl)
• Forest Born – a good way to round up the Books of Bayern series
• My Lady Jane – an alternate history of Lady Jane Grey complete with added shifters and modern humour.
• My Plain Jane – Jane Eyre rewritten to include modern humour and a ghost catching society. Much lolz.

Just a few books ;p

Did you read anything good last month? What about your goals for February?

I specified my goals for this year, but almost forgot to lay out my goals for this month; the steps that will get me toward my yearly goals. So without further ado:

• edit and resubmit several of my ‘in circulation’ short stories (stories I’m currently sending out and trying to sell).
• compile beta feedback on Nothing Charming and complete edits using the Deep Edits lecture packet from Margie Lawson,
• compile beta feedback on Lovely/Lonely and commence edits.

as long as I can resist playing this ;p

It’s a fairly hefty list (even if the last one is more open ended with merely ‘commence’ edits ;p ) considering it’s school holidays so I’ll be doing this with kids constantly at home around me. I have some lofty stretch goals for the year though (I didn’t list them in my yearly goals yet) so I’m planning to get as much done early on as I can.

Last year I gathered all this wonderful feedback, but haven’t had a chance to actually go over and get to work on the notes. So this month is the start of rectifying that.

Also, whenever I get a short story back with a rejection I always give it at least one run through before putting it back out there – after all usually at least a couple of months have passed and usually I’ve learned or thought of a few new things which I can use to improve my work. I do quite a few more than one if it was a feedback rejection, because I have notes to work with.

Anyway, here’s hoping I don’t spend all my spare time paying Ragnarok M: Eternal Love when it comes out, and get lots of work done!

I loved my gifted cat calendar from Japan so much I regularly posted pages on my Instagram

When I first went to write this post all I could think of was the last third of the year, where things were not great, especially not writing-wise. I thought “I’ve barely achieved anything this year. Man, I don’t want to write a round-up post about how much I failed.” But then when I looked through it, of my nine goals, three were partially completed and five were thoroughly completed. That’s only one actual fail. I cheered right back up.

On the other hand, I don’t want to entirely gloss over the failure. After all, imagine how much more I could have achieved if I hadn’t gotten bogged down in my own head/bad habits for the last few months?

I found a place which makes amazing udon near me, so this was me a fair bit of the year ;p

I love giving feedback, but this year, partly out of ambition, partly out of obligation for the large amount of beta-ing I was asking others to do, and partly because I struggle to be the no-saying meanie I severely over extended myself in the giving feedback department. In addition for my 5-6 short stories I critique every month for my writers group meeting I also beta-ed eight novels. Near the end I started to get frustrated it had been so long since I’d worked on my own stuff and that turned into a bad habit where, when I felt like I wasn’t getting anything done, I’d fall back on games for my sense of achievement, instead of using them as my treat for a job well done. I’m sure you can guess how much that helped the sense (and reality) of not getting things done…

Vicious cycle.

On the upside, compared to 2017 I didn’t burn or severely slash my hands and arms, though 2018 didn’t like my right foot since I slashed the underside of my foot rushing to get a bin out in time and later severely sprained my ankle  running to the park with Xander (it was six weeks before I could walk properly, and it’s clearly never going to be ‘back to normal’ because it’s very easy to pull if I walk or land funny). Generally though, health-wise, it wasn’t as awful.

my special little snowflake ;p

Harley is very much a threenager. Someone please tell me the tantrums go away >.< Also she gave me a LOT of late nights while trying to drop her day nap but failing. This mean she’d have her nap late in the afternoon, and would wake in the evening refreshed and ready for play for a few more hours, meaning we’d be up super late. She’d sleep in the next morning so *she* got the right amount of sleep, but I’m up early to get Xander ready for school and on the bus, so no helpful sleep-in for me. However, she is adorable. You should hear her singing ‘Baby Shark’ XD and her vocabulary is exploding (she’s a little late in speaking, and considering Xander is non-verbal this was a massive concern for us). She is also nuts for My Little Pony. She struggles with words more than two syllables long, unless it’s Fluttershy, or Twilight Sparkle, or Rainbow Dash, then she has allllllll the syllables ;p  Also, I can’t believe she starts kindy this year!

Xander is still a sweet prince. He puts up with Harley like an ANGEL. This boy is the kindest big brother in the universe. Harley is even one of his very few verbalised words (and the way he says it too too cute!). He’s doing well in school and I can’t wait for his birthday in a few more days because he’s going to love some of his presents and where he’s going for the day.

And back to the writing, here’s how I went with my 2018 goals:

Goal#1 – Publish the Charming Series: I want to have the first four ready to go, I’ve currently got the first two ready, and three needs me to action its feedback (I’ve gathered the beta feedback just haven’t yet actioned it), so I’m close, but I’m determined to not just rush junk out there, I’d rather have them well-polished and ready for rapid release.

Goal#2 – Get beta feedback on Lovely/Lonely: Success, I gathered it. I haven’t actioned it yet, but the goal was specifically about gathering so I count this as a win.

Goal#3 – Continue writing and publishing short fiction in traditional publishing markets: I wrote six new short stories (Alone Time, Delivery Man Wanted, Money For Meat, The Taste of Blood, The Last Breath Before Foam, Against The Black Knight). One story was published this year, Groundskeeper in Stupefy Stories#22. I’ve been waiting a while to see this one finally in print so am super happy, plus , it’s a part of my Retailored Fairy Tales world which I’m planning to focus on a fair bit this next year or two. As for other stories such as the six new ones I wrote I’ve been submitting almost exclusively to pro markets this year, which means less sales so far, but I have had some hold requests and feedback rejections, which is always promising.

Goal#4 – Take my back catalogue of short stories that are out of their exclusivity periods and self-publish them: this was planned to fill out small gaps in the publishing schedule of the Charming for Hire series, so since I didn’t release that I didn’t want to squander these. I did do some work regarding formatting and covers though, so this is a partial complete with a good reason for not finishing.

Goal#5 – Start working towards creating a monthly fiction podcast: well, yes, I’ve *started* but still only at the most basic levels, looking into hosting, production schedule, what I’ll need, basic fiddling with Audacity, but no recordings. I’m still undecided as to whether I’ll do a serial show (a novel read in parts) or a short fiction podcast (different story each episode).

Goal#6 – Continue being a good president to Vision Writers Group: I feel I completed this duty well this year. When the Yahoo boards glitched out I swooped in like a superhero (;p ) and found us a new home for the group as well as carefully laid down the foundation for my retirement. Yes. This was my last year as president of the group, I’m still remaining and active member though. Gotta get my critiquing/being critiqued fix somewhere ;p

Goal#7 – Complete one of the unfinished novels: I finished ‘Keys, Clocks, Quests’ just after Camp NaNoWriMo back in April. The two halves are quite different from one another and the plot outline mutated a bit so extensive self edits will be needed, but hey, I’ve still completed the first draft of my fourth novel.

Goal#8 – Continue learning: I’m fairly confident in this one. I added a few more podcasts to my already hefty subscription list, continued on almost entirely up to date with the 5 Years to Become a Bestseller course, and also took part in Margie Lawson’s ‘Writing Body Language and Dialogue Cues Like A Psychologist’. I read 10 new craft books this year as well. I also beta read 8 (yes EIGHT) other people’s novels in addition to my normal feedback for Vision, and you learn a lot when teaching/critiquing others too.

Goal#9 – Rewrite Written by the Stars: I didn’t even touch this. Unfortunately it was scheduled for the ill-fated end of the year, so didn’t stand much of a chance. It’s now scheduled for the start of 2019 at least.

Even my crossword app is giving me ‘subtle’ hints I need to get to work

Like I said, not as bad as I thought. I also did all of my mini goals set last year (updating the site’s look, adding my ‘books read’ to my monthly goal round-ups, and upping my reading speed). Not to mention I read A LOT. 101 books officially completed and reviewed. I did read a few books which were bleh and I didn’t finish. I didn’t review them and aren’t counting them. I also listen to a lot of fiction podcasts.

I also enjoyed a lot of story in the form of watching anime while up late trying to get Harley down, and through my bad gaming habit. I posted about my favourites already. If you missed them or are curious here’s my Top 8 Anime of 2018, and Favourite Video Games of 2018(at least I got a blog post out of all that distraction ;p ).

And to wrap this all up, my goals for 2019:

• Rewrite Written by The Stars, ideally also do my self edits and get some feedback so I can send it out to agents and publishers again.
• Complete edits on Lovely/Lonely. I have the feedback, now to action it so it too is ready to be submitted.
• Get the Charming For Hire series ready for publication and release it. This year for sure! I still want to have the first four 100% ready and ideally the 5th close to it so I can use the rapid release tactic.
• Continue writing and publishing short fiction for traditional markets. I love doing this. Not sure I could stop if I tried.
• Work on my fiction podcast. I’m not going to rush this too much, but I’d like to seriously start recording some stuff very soon. It’s something I really want to do, but also want to do well.
• Write at least one new novel. What will it be? Even I don’t know yet ;p
• Work on more Retailored Fairy Tales stories. I’ve got the loose plots for some Troll’s Toll sequels rattling around up here as well as some other ideas.
• Continue learning. This one’s always here. It will never not be.

Are you setting any big goals for yourself in 2019? Anything you wish you could see from me? Your enthusiasm might make me add it to my goals list.