On Creativity

On Dasher. On Blitzen! Did Santa have a reindeer named Creativity? Didn't think so, but it would be awesome if he did.

I'm still struggling to get the creative juices flowing. Real life keeps interrupting. Things like doctor visits, school registration, shopping, cooking, cleaning, family wanting to talk to me, dogs that need to go out, phone calls, and on and on and on. Finding time to write has been hard. I need a few hours uninterrupted to really get stuff going, but those hours can't happen when I'm tired or having a migraine day. Too hard to think. So I'm trying to schedule writing time in the mornings between nine and noon. I need to quit scheduling appointments then. And re-train my kids to leave me alone for those hours of the day.

Then I need to find my discipline. It's too easy to let Facebook or email or this blog distract me. I can spend hours doing story "research" surfing clickbait stories and watching bizarre videos on YouTube. It's all story fodder, yes, but unless I write stories, it's just wasted time.

So here's my goal: I will finish the rough draft for Blue Mage: Shadow Nothings by Halloween. I'm about 10% done with the story, so it's a reachable goal. I'm also aiming at getting one short story written, polished, and either published or submitted somewhere every month. For publishing, I'm working on another short story collection. I'm planning on publishing that one in December. Then it's on to an Altairan Empire short story collection, with new stories written. I've also got Taco Truck Elves to write. And dozens of other stories and novels. But the point of goal setting is to set achievable, measurable goals, so I'll stick with Blue Mage: Shadow Nothings and the one short story a month. I promised Blue Mage to my daughter for Christmas four years ago, it's about time I delivered.

So speaking of short stories every month, this month I published Interagency Cooperation, a short story related to the Taco Truck Elves. It introduces the F.B.I.- Fairyland Border Investigations. Illegal border crossings happen all the time and it is up to the FBI agents to mitigate the damage on the unsuspecting human population.

Get the story free with code UN83G!