When 1979 turned to 1980, I had just read Tom Sawyer for the first time, and I recognized that my time of childhood was coming to a close. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and wondering about the changes the new decade would bring.

And what a ride that was! By the time 1989 turned to 1990, I had completed my time in both high school and the Army, and I was in California, losing a girl, and looking forward to an unknown future in Arizona.

And what a ride that was! By the time 1999 turned to 2000, Arizona had long been my home, I had run and dissolved two corporations, my hotel career had come and gone, and I had become a motorcycle-riding, hamster-owning, budding computer whiz. Everyone was wondering what the new millenium would bring, but in the front of my mind was the question of what I'd find in the new decade.

And what a ride that was! Now, as 2009 turns to 2010, I find myself looking back another amazing decade. My computer career has waxed and waned, I'm looking back on nearly ten years of happiness with the girl who became my wife in 2006, and I finally seem to have the pieces in place for a novel-writing career of unknown size and dimension.

Given my past experience, I think that I can safely say that, no matter what my plans are, I can expect to find myself ten years from now someplace completely unexpected, looking back on an amazing decade, and saying: "Wow! What a ride that was!"

First, The Broken Jack is back from the beta readers, with good news. Given their feedback, I am preparing some small but significant changes to the beginning of the book, and few if any to the end. I think the last third of the book will be quite hard to forget, but I need to make sure people get that far. The possible changes have been stewing in my head for a number of weeks now, and I think they are about ready. I expect to complete my revisions and to begin circulating the manuscript rather quickly.

My editing attention is now turned squarely to The Dancing Queen. In my initial review of it, which was supposed to be a final cleanup, I realized that I have a lot to consider for the book. I know of no better way of "considering" changes to a book than printing it out and wrecking the paper, so that is what I am doing. Hopefully I will have good progress to report soon.

The biggest progress of the month, however, has been with my writing organization as a whole. Over the years, my source documents have migrated from one format to another as I looked for tools and structure to handle all my types of projects without duplicating things and so on. It has been a long and frustrating search. For a while I was trying to shoehorn things into my own XML format, but that was unwieldy and cumbersome to maintain. Most recently, I migrated my material into a set of OpenOffice.org documents using a style derived from the Manuscript format, but that, also, proved not to be a step forward. In the end, I found myself with a bunch of separate projects, disconnected from my ideas, disconnected from my notes, disconnected from the past, and disconnected, frequently, from other copies of the same thing.

No more.

I wrote before that I was exploring using Emacs and Org Mode to organize and edit my work. After a number of fits and starts and trying to figure out exactly what I was trying to do, I have struck gold, or fallen in love, or some other metaphor that invokes images of happiness and prosperity. Over the past month, I have migrated my work into the new system, and it is better than I hoped it would be.

Now, for the first time since it was on paper in a set of binders and file folders, all my work is together in a common system again. Everything is connected. All the tasks feed into a common system. Even better, this has reconnected me to a lot of work that had fallen behind the filing cabinet, so to speak. New work has been done on stories that I haven't touched or even thought about in years. And better still, the new format lends itself to publishing to the web, so I should be able to finally bring some things that have been missing for a long time back to my website, or more.

So, all in all, thanks to my beta readers and Emacs and Org Mode, it has been a great month. And December looks to be even better.

Leo describes goal elimination as a logical extension of minimalism, and he makes a very good argument. I have found great value in the principles and practice of voluntary simplicity, and I can see its wisdom reflected in the elimination of goals.

Now, I'm wondering if I might be better off not setting goals for my writing enterprise. Does that mean I don't hope or expect to get anything done? Not at all! In fact, Leo writes, and I see the logic, that this will lead to better and more satisfying productivity: use time and energy on doing what you love instead of making and measuring goals. Two things I think are important: first, the realization that the best that you can ever hope for is to spend your time doing what you love, and second, the understanding that the journey actually is the destination.

So, while I am comfortable in saying that I'll be working on both Taxi Adventure and The Dancing Queen this month, I don't want to set a goal of finishing them. I know that there is a good chance I'll get wrapped up in one or the other of them and neglect the other, and a decent chance that I will find something else compelling and work on that instead. And what's the use of taking the time to set a goal that will only nag at me and make me feel bad when I'm out having a good time? I don't see a value in it at the moment.

Even more, I'm now considering how I might rewrite my business plan to value the journey and skip the goals. A business plan without goals? That is something to think about!

I think that everyone should read Leo's excellent article, and all his thoughtful and provocative articles at mnmlist.com. Take your mind back from the big business marketers, get off the treadmill, and really enjoy your life.

All this has been documented here before, and I don't need to go into it again. As I pass this milestone, however, I wonder what I can expect in the next hundred days, and beyond. Once again I see the sailing as rather straightforward, almost uneventful. But it's hard to see what might be over the horizon out here on the ocean. I might be sailing into terrible sea monsters, or a tropical paradise.

And whether monsters, paradise, or merely gentle waves through a sea of productivity, it's more fun that what I left behind.

It has occurred to me that it is possible that no one else may like this book. Perhaps oddly, that's okay with me. I like it. I think it fits its role perfectly. I think it's an excellent example of the hero's journey structure. I like the characters and the story. I think it is a very good book, my best so far. That's the best, really, that I can ever hope for. And I have achieved that. Now, I am moving on to other things. In fact, I have The Dancing Queen open right now. It's back on the front burner at last.

Of course, while I don't need other people to like The Broken Jack, my career path will be easier if people do, and the more the better. To that end, I will now do everything I can to get people to like it. The first, best thing I can do in that regard is to make sure the book is as good as it can be. Thus, it is now out to proofreaders. I hope to have results back from them by the end of this month, and to have it out to publishers shortly after. At last.

I've noticed that my productivity goes way up in times that I am disconnected from the Internet. I wonder if that's true for everyone, or only those who don't deny it.

Today I finished migrating the base of my weblog to a structure using NanoBlogger, bringing the last of my work to my own computer, my own files, my own control. NanoBlogger is excellent. Though some may balk at the fact that it has no comment system built in, and it used to be a reason that kept me from using it, it doesn't bother me now. Instead, I have my comment system set up to route through e-mail. I have set up the templates so that every post (and every page) has links to send comments to the author by e-mail. Transferring comments to the page would be a manual process, but it's very flexible: it permits anonymous comments, signed comments, or even encrypted comments. Eventually, I can envision that these e-mail comments might be processed using ProcMail, to be filtered for spam using SpamAssassin (or whatever), then attached to the correct post and re-uploaded, all automatically. But that will have to be a task on down the road.

For now, I'm very happy that it's an e-mail solution. As part of disentangling from the web, I've been rediscovering the joy of e-mail. As instant messaging and text messaging and microblogging have emerged, my communications channels have gotten out of control. With so many streams to stay on top of, and so much always calling for my time, everything has fallen behind, and e-mail has fallen by the wayside. As part of my disentangling, I've returned my e-mail to my own computer, and made it my primary means of communication again. Now, I can give it the attention it deserves, and I've found that it is actually fun again. I'm still not caught up on the backlog of e-mails I need to reply to, but I'm getting there.

For disentangling from the web, there's still a ways to go, and more work to do, but not much of either. So far, the boost in productivity and clarity and focus have been amazing.

First, the great news: after more years idle than I'd like to admit, and more years in production than I can believe, The Broken Jack is finally through major edits. That is, it has finally reached a point where it can be printed out, and read, and (theoretically, anyway) enjoyed, without any notes of "FIXME: This" or "CHECK: That". Wow!

And the even better news is that it seems to be a good book. At least, I like it a lot. For a lot of years, I thought of this book as disposable, one that I should write just to be done with, for experience, not because it was worthwhile. The result has been different from what I expected, though. It has turned out really good: the characters are fun and the conflict is interesting and everything gets worse every day. Opinions will vary, of course, but I think this might be my best book so far, and I didn't see that coming.

And that, actually, is also the bad news. Once, my plan was to burn through the book just to get it out of the way and be done with it. Now that it seems good to me, it matters, and I want it to be as good as possible. So, although the major edits are complete, I'm going through the manuscript with a red pen again, and I'm not hesitating to make changes that I think are improvements. And so far, I'm marking up every page.

So, that's where we are. On the bright side, the major edits are done, and it seems to be very good. On the dark side, it seems to be very good, so it behooves me to make it the best that it can be. It will still be done, and done soon. But it was supposed to be done already. Actually, it was supposed to be done already, but not very good, and instead it seems very good, but still needs work. I'll take that trade any day.

The Broken Jack

There was good news and bad news with this book. The good news was that, to my surprise, this has morphed from a disposable book written for practice to a strong book written for keeps. The bad news is that, now that it is so close to being truly worthwhile, I can't bum-rush it out the door. All the same, I expect to have it out to my beta readers at the end of this week, and out to publishers by next month.

Website

Probably the most visible change I made was to this website, finally leaving WordPress (hopefully) once and for all. As I've said before, WordPress is a good tool, but I don't think it's a good fit for what I'm trying to do. Right now, the weblog portion of this site is being managed by Blogger, but that may change by the end of this month, too.

Taxi Adventure

I did not get much done for this in August, but I did get a few holes filled in. I hope to get more done this month. I'd like to get it to the final draft stage. We'll see.

The Dancing Queen

I didn't really expect to work on this in August, but there I was in the middle of the night one night, riding with Jack and Raven again, watching Brandy dance. This book is really good, and I can't wait to get back to it full time.

3-Day Novel

The biggest change in my plans so far has been to skip the 3-Day Novel Contest. Alas, money is tight, the contest is not free (or cheap) to enter, and I would prefer to use my time clearing out old projects instead of beginning new ones. Hmm. Maybe next year.

Business

My intentions were to upgrade my plans, my records, and my marketing, and I made good progress on all of these fronts. Another month or two of good progress, and I should be up to speed.

The Desert King

Last, but not least, I really did get all the files uploaded, checked, and approved to enhance the availability of The Desert King. In fact, it is now available through BN.com, IndieBound, and by special order at virtually any bookstore in the world. I still haven't made a formal announcement about that, and I probably should. And oh, yeah, wasn't I going to record an audiobook for this? I should get on that.

Wow! Until I made this post, I thought I had not achieved many of my August goals. In fact, I made good progress. If I can keep up this pace, I should expect Big Things to happen in the future, and maybe the near future. There may be a way to write a stream of books, each more excellent than the last, without ever attracting attention, but I can't seriously believe that's an option. It's not something I can even reasonably be afraid of anymore.