Tag Archives: plans

Making Plans of Scribbles and Scrolls...

by Liana Posted on December 30, 2012

Thoughts here, please. I'm working away at setting up project and production goals for the year and I feel utterly torn. Do you have rathers?

  1. I thought about setting up a subscription website with everything I have available—fiction, poetry, etc.—normally for sale available to subscribers. Say $5/mo.
  2. I also thought about doing an email subscription fiction thing, like Bruce Holland does here.
  3. I thought about hosting a quarterly fishbowl, where readers can prompt stories/poetry and read their own while I save the rest for submission or they can sponsor those stories for free publication.
  4. I thought about doing a print books subscription thing like Dean Wesley Smith does here.
  5. I thought about doing a web serial updating upon donations (don't think I have the audience for that).

Do any of these appeal to you? Would you be interested in any of these?

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Something That Matters

by Liana Posted on December 29, 2012

Dear Scribbler,

I've been reading up about a writer's production goals and reading arliddian's latest open letter, a beautiful piece, and reaching out to the muse-ish side of my own self, and it made me want to sit down thoughtfully again and have a chat on behalf of the new year.

I want to write something that matters.

Oh, I know I should start off with the business stuff, but a long time ago, I wrote a lot of fanfiction and I wrote out 14 things in fandom I had never done, which included writing anything that mattered, that influenced others. The very next day, I posted a driveby question:

What is it about writing something that matters that scares the mess out of me?!

I still want to write something that matters.

In the interests of getting there, I'd like to produce: you know a few hundred thousand words of fiction wouldn't hurt, and at least 2 or 3 completed short stories or novel chapters wouldn't either. Figuring out print books on createspace would make me very, very happy.

But...

If there's anything I want to do different this year, it's that. The significance. The mattering. I want to reach people, not just scribble off into the abyss. And that willingness to scribble into the abyss has gotten me where I am, has made me willing to keep on putting one word in front of the other, and taking the time to create something of myself, but use it, muse.

Use it and do something with myself. I want to see my faith in my fiction. I want to see the girls who are not pretty and why that matters. I want to see feminine strength that is strength. I want to see the things I care about, the characters who prove that healing is possible, self-sacrifice is real, love is power, God is neither irrelevant nor evil, that the price for true power is giving up our selves and our wrongs, not embracing them.

I don't know how to wrestle these words into something that fits the shape of my heart, but this is me. This is it. I am writer. This is what I want this year.

Thanks,

the scribbler

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An Update on the Scribblings of the Scribbler

by Liana Posted on October 25, 2012

As some of you know, I'm quite busy trying to keep roof over head, redo a website, and provide necessary support for the movie project I've been a part of for... a long time. You probably don't know what I've been up to or why it's taken me so long.

En brief, am:

  1. proofreading a novella for a client
  2. drafting three stories for the last Ficlet o'Clock—Room for Magic, Breath from a Stone, and (fanfic) Girls that Go Bump in the Mind
  3. submittingsomething once weekly via the Heinlein challenge
  4. creating huge swaths of new functionality for a client's website
  5. creating huge swaths of new functionality for this website
  6. in the process of the above, identifying a plethora of bugs for the Pods CMS team
  7. finishing a huge special cleaning job and then heading into my regular time-consuming cleaning job
  8. applying for work in Civil Services :prays... hard:
  9. trying to order the muse to pipe down on City of Glass and Storm (It's a tad ambitious to try to finish three shorts and two novellas simultaneously. Just saying.)
  10. reading everyone else's blogs and posted fiction in the smatterings of moments I dare to ambitiously call "free time"

What's on your docket?

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The New — Blogging Beyond the Comfort Zone

by Liana Posted on August 31, 2012

How many times do I reinvent myself? I try this and that and fail and succeed, then hack away at it again. Anyone who has been following my Twitter feed may have noticed my struggles with striking the right balance for City of Glass, creating a beautiful online journal and blog aimed more at my readers than my fellow writers, and deciding how to earn an income from my fiction when I simply do not finish novels at the pace of those chunking up the change in independent publishing.

The truth is, I have been afraid, so very afraid, that I have been doing the wrong thing, even while moving forward on projects unrelated to Liana Mir and that I cannot discuss here. But these things take time and understanding.

The goal of this post is to sort through some of the things I have been struggling with, experiencing, and what they mean. In particular, this is where I come to grips with what this blog is about, what I want to be, and embracing the new. Continue reading →

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Posting Schedule Change-Up for City of Glass

by Liana Posted on August 27, 2012
This entry is part 12 of 13 in the series City of Glass

Due to a fear on my part of moving too slowly, I bumped up my initial City of Glass posting schedule to twice weekly. Due to the reality of my first thought being the better one, I'm bumping it back down to once weekly. The novel will now update on Thursdays only.

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5 Things Meme: Goals

by Liana Posted on August 17, 2012
This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series 5 Things Meme

Comment to this post saying "FIVE!" and I will pick five things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random.

Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself, hopefully for the rest of eternity!

From arliddian: Current Goals and Resolutions

The difference between where I am now and where I want to be can be measured in concrete, physical things: earn a decent weekly income at writing, get x stories published as ebooks, get x stories into print, post this many articles weekly, blog about things that matter, finish writing City of Glass, etc. But that isn't how I measure this journey.

See, there's another challenge arliddian gave me, the challenge to write 100 things about creativity. I took that challenge, held it in my mental palm, side-eyed it, set it down, then turned it over until finally I did the inevitable and took it completely apart to reassemble it into something better, something me. The result was I saw a journey I wanted to make, and it had nothing to do with outside goals.

pathway

Continue reading →

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Creative Plans: Daily Reports, Kickstarter, and Fishbowls

by Liana Posted on August 8, 2012

The Daily Creation was an idea I had to create something daily. Well, one week in and I'm discontinuing it. While I still intend to create daily, I will not be reporting or sharing along that aspect of my life. It's too stressful, and as I told someone else, I work well under deadline and lousy under pressure.

On the other hand, I have looked into Kickstarter as an option to bringing you more fiction projects but have found them insufficient to my long-term needs and recalcitrant at allowing me to use a non-DBA penname. Surprisingly, you don't have to get a doing-business-as to use a penname. Just provide your real name whenever legal items or payment is involved.

That said, I've been studying successful fishbowls of Anke Wehner, rix_scaedu, and Ysabet the Wordsmith, and I think it's a good way to develop and stockpiling the fiction and nonfiction frontlist I've got mulling over here.

More on this soon!

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Choosing Vulnerability

by Liana Posted on August 6, 2012

Some days I hate my writing. Today is one of those days and the reason I almost failed to update City of Glass, my current serialized science fiction novel, this morning. I hate the whole story. I want to throw it in a river to go and rot.

Every writer I have ever met has experienced this at one time or another. It's a side effect really of our pursuit of perfection. We need that pursuit. It's what brings you fully-developed wonderful literature instead of half-baked half-written stories that leave you wondering what we were doing when were supposed to be writing. It's important. Without that pursuit, we would be unable to create the works that inspire us and make us want to keep putting pen to paper day after day.

But there's thing called a commitment. I made a promise to not just put pen to paper, so to speak, but also to put paper to bed and send it out into the great wide world twice a week for readers to enjoy—or not. I really can't control that part. Commitment is important too, necessary to us artistic types who want every word we produce to be perfect. Without that commitment, we would never be able to stop writing, editing, revising, etc. and hand over our work to the reader. It would never get to you.

And then, there's resolve. It's that murky bridge in between the two. My resolve is what allows me to do what I need to do, even when I don't want to. I still hate City of Glass as it stands. I still hate the chapter I finally kicked out the door this morning. I still wish I had never, ever made that stubborn commitment to produce a novel that wasn't finished first so I could belabor it into perfection.

But I am resolved to fulfill my commitment. The new installment is up. I have done my duty and must wash my hands of perfection.

There.

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