#109: New Things Coming

This is more of a personal update than the instructive blogs on writing that I’ve been posting recently. If you don’t care—I get it—feel free to skip this one. If you do, I’m delighted to have you.

2019 has been a year of significant and exciting changes for me. But it means that I can’t dedicate as much time to writing as I was able to before, and so I’ve been looking for ways to keep the momentum going. In the past, I wrote about using your strengths outside of writing to build a support system for the art that you want to make while you develop your chops to go full time. I also wrote about the importance of keeping at it for a long time. The 10,000-hours rule might have been a hype but regardless of what side are you on, putting in as many hours as you can to develop your craft is just a good idea in general, whether you got that from Malcolm Gladwell, or it’s your common sense.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can leverage my strengths to give myself space to write (I’m a programmer by trade), and how to set up a system that won’t let me drift away from writing as life goes on. It’s easier than you think. One day you’re ploughing through edits, slaying your darlings, snipping adjectives, taking unnecessary characters out back, then another day comes, and you haven’t done anything on it for months. Life’s a sneaky little bastard. Giving up writing unintentionally like that would be a huge shame.

A few weeks ago, I sat down to process everything and decide what to do next. Many sheets of paper were scribbled and sketched upon, and there came an idea. One thing led to another (as they do), and now I’m working on an app for myself and writers like me that are in it for the long term.

Not many things have been finalised as of now—it’s still early days. My goal is to build something to help me and writers like me to stay accountable and to track their progress at times when it feels like they’re not making any progress at all. I would like to build something that helps motivate writers, something that helps people build and maintain their writing routines, something that I would be delighted to use myself every day.

Ultimately, I’d like it to become a stream of income that would support the time I want to put into writing. (Check out this classic The Creative Penn post from 2010. Joanna is a well-known proponent of not relying solely on book sales.)

So that’s where I am at right now. Thanks for reading!

The original plan was to launch an initial version of the product in time for NaNoWriMo. We’ll see how that goes! Make sure to be on my mailing list to be the first one to know when the app becomes available. I can’t wait for you to try it.


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