rowyn

I just had two last year:

Keep an activity log

This was surprisingly difficult, given that all I had to do was write down a date and ten or twelve words about what I'd done that day. I kept up with it fairly well through until mid-June, then started to fall apart (ironically, just about when I was most doing the kind of creative stuff that the activity log was supposed to track.) Around August I tried to back-fill July and made a stab at keeping up through August. In September I gave up. Well, "stopped" would be more accurate, since it was more I-keep-forgetting than a conscious I-don't-want-to. At the end of of November, I started again and have kept it up since.

So the grade here would be around 8.5 months out of 12, for a C-.

Do some marathons

This was in the creative sense. I did the following:

* January: 30in30 -- ladyperegrine and I did the 30in30 challenge together, with a goal of each producing thirty art cards. I actually did this. And even traded one of them. Yay! This put me on an art binge that lasted through February, culminating in an 18x24" poster for beetiger, traded for one of the beautiful necklaces from her Frozen Honeybee Collection (the one pictured here, in fact). And which ended when I tried to do another piece of art for a friend and completely hated my sketch and stopped drawing for ... um ... pretty much the year, really.
* June: 30in30 -- this one was for writing entries, which I also accomplished.
* July: 10in10 -- for writing Sign and Sacrifice, in the hopes that I would kickstart myself writing again.
* November -- I set a goal of finishing Sign and Sacrifice in November. All I succeeded in finishing was an outline for the rest of the novel. I wrote maybe a few hundred words of story in the entire month. FAIL.

So I actually accomplished something like two marathons and a mini-marathon. Technically, I guess this is a success, in that 2.5=plural="some". I suspect I was thinking "some = four or five" when I started, though. On the other hand, I did a bunch of other creative stuff even when I wasn't marathoning, and since the underlying hope was "do more creative stuff", I'll call it a B+ on this.

Other Stuff from 2010

delight_in_wt: I started this during the June marathon, and did quite a bit of writing on it even after the marathon finished, until my enjoyment of it petered out in September.

sleethnamedthis: the World Tree game I've been running weekly on FurryMUCK since October 2009 is still going -- over sixty sessions now! The community is supposed to get updated with logs, but I am very bad about posting them. I believe this is the most frequently-running game I've ever done. Usually I hate running a game every week, but the format of this one has made it much easier to keep up on. I think in fifteen months it's been running, we've only cancelled seven or eight sessions.

Sign and Sacrifice: Despite my abject failure at NaNoFiMo, I've been writing steadily if not quickly since December, mostly on S&S. I got about 9800 words written in December. While not particularly impressive, this is still much better than 0.

Overall

The message of 2010 would be "I am doing this for love, not money". My creative efforts have been scattershot and not focused on anything I ever expect to get paid for. Despite this, I have an awful lot of determination to pursue them anyway, especially given that I often dread putting in the necessary work.

I am not sure why this is; either why I dread it, or why I am determined anyway. The latter is perhaps because I just don't feel like me if I'm not making anything.

One of my new year's resolutions was to do more of the creative-challenge marathonish things. I did an art-card challenge in January and then came up with a bunch of excuses for myself on why I shouldn't do more. Some of which were not even terrible; I did finish a couple of little paintings and a couple of detailed pastel pictures.

But I haven't done much lately. And I keep meaning to do more writing without, um. Actually doing more writing. I seem to have forgotten whatever it was that got me writing fiction consistently from 2002 to 2006. Wait, that's not quite true. I remember "commitment" got me to finish Prophecy. But it also made me miserable, and trading "reasonably happy but unproductive" for "anxious and whiny but productive" isn't what I'm looking for.

So. Yeah. What I want is to get myself to the point where I just happen to feel like writing on a regular basis. I vaguely recall that for a while in 2005 and 2006, this was the case. I don't have any real idea how to get there from here, though. But since doing the 30in30 for art cards made me feel like drawing for a couple of months afterwards, I'm going to try doing a 30in30 for writing.

When I did the 30in30 with art cards, my criteria was that I had to do one art card. It did not have to be done skillfully, nor did it have to be on any particular subject. I even did one abstract, which was pretty horrid. Since this approach appeared to work, I'll use similarly lax criteria for the writing version. I'll try to average one entry per day, preferably fiction, but my typical essayish blog entry will count. Writing for the World Tree game will also count, because I've been doing a chunk of that lately and I'm enjoying it, so I don't want it to fall off the list of acceptable activities.

I'll probably post most of the fiction to UnfinishedTales, so most of y'all won't be able to follow along to keep me honest. Even so, I find that publishing my intentions down does keep me honest.

This little post probably shouldn't count, and the post I did to UnfinishedTales this morning was written two weeks ago, so it definitely shouldn't count. Still. Between the two I'll probably set the count to 1 as of this posting. >:)

Keep an activity log.

This is based on haikujaguar's suggestion. I'm writing down, very briefly, whatever it is that I did that day. The focus is creative stuff, but I'm including non-creative stuff which was time-consuming and/or significant things that I had to get done. Sample entry:

1/10/10
Art card
Xp allocation for WT
Laundry (4 loads)
HS: 6.5

The "HS" is the day's rating on my happiness scale, because one thing that I want when I'm depressed is to be able to look back and see how much of my life I've spent depressed. I'd like to be able to point to a big block of day-by-day assessments and say "hey, you averaged a 7.2 for the last two years so quit it with the 'I'm always depressed' stuff. This too will pass." We'll see if it works.

I am tempted to include other stuff -- which games I played or movies I watched or conversations I had -- but the point is to make it something quick that I can do in a few minutes, and that I can catch up on if I miss a few days. So trying to avoid scope creep. It's a log, not a diary. I've been doing it since December 29 -- apparently I liked the idea enough to try it immediately -- and it seems easy enough.

Do some marathons

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article about marathons, making the point that, "in a long-term fitness sense, marathons are really sprints; the true marathon is the exercise program that lasts for decades".

And I think this applies to creative marathons like Nanowrimo and the 24 hour comics and the like. They're really sprints in the sense of a long-term creative life.

But this is not to trivialize the commitment and energy that marathons require, which is considerable! Moreover, there's something pleasantly rewarding about setting and achieving short-term goals. So in 2010 I want to set some more short-term goals like these, things I can do for a week or a month and then declare victory over them. Some of these may be more marathon-like than others.

January's marathon is to finish the 30in30 project. I'm at twelve so far.

February may or may not have a marathon. I'll decide when I get there.

And that's it for my 2010 NYR. I just want something goal-oriented and simple this year, since last year's felt both too broad and too vague.