Goals

This is a somewhat counter productive post, as you will see once I get into it, but it's something that I think about a lot while I'm writing, and seeing as how I'm coming up blank with anything else to write about, it seems a good time to talk about it. I'm not exactly sure how long ago it started - maybe after around one hundred blog posts - but for a very long time I have had a goal of having twice as many fiction posts as real talk posts. The problem with that being, of course, that every time I write a real talk post, I have to write two fiction posts, and there are stretches of time where I find great difficulty in trying to come up with new fiction to write. And that happens more than I'd like to think about.

I've never really been all that far off, though I have certainly been closer at some times than others. At the moment, with the addition of this particular post, I will be twenty-one fiction posts behind my goal. In theory, that's not that bad. After all, I've been writing this for some time, and have surpassed five hundred blog posts only a short while ago. Twenty one in the grand scheme of things is not that many. But when you look at it in a more short-term light, that's three straight weeks of fiction, and as much as I would love to be able to do something like that, with my tendencies, it seems unlikely. However, I do get into my long stretches of fiction, for instance having written eight fictional pieces between this real talk and the previous. That's a pretty good ratio, eight to two. And I'd really only have to keep up a ratio of five fictions to two real talks in order to keep gaining. Write fiction throughout the week, and real talks on the weekends.

If only it were so simple. As some of my friends are well aware, my creativity is not something that can be controlled. It comes and goes, and some days I can latch onto an idea quite quickly and easily, while others it can take up to hours of searching for inspiration. Which is just as painful for the people trying to help me as it is to myself.

For as long as I can remember, however, I have been behind on that goal. I have gotten extremely close - I believe at one point I was only about four pieces behind. But it only takes a few days of lack of inspiration to really mess with that, and I can have that for all too long.

There are certainly things that I want to write. I need to work more on the Wings story that I wrote in November, and I have been wanting to write my elemental instruments story for a few years now. Just yesterday I had a new idea for that that became yesterday's blog post. But I try not to write those all too frequently on the blog, because those are things that I want to become full books, and if you can find all of the content online for free, there doesn't seem to be all that much purpose to buying the book, other than to have it in the intended order. Not that I want to nickel and dime anyone who would want to read my writings, but someday I would like to be able to make a living off of them. Which is another goal all in itself.