That’s a serious question up there.  If I’m stepping back from writing then there aren’t going to be a lot of weekly goals.  Nothing beyond the basic, which would be sleep, work, eat, and spend time with my son.  That last one is the only thing that will really bring out some stories too.  So, these posts might become a little thin for a while.  Not unless I get to a point where I can touch my notebooks.

It was pointed out that I’ve been talking about this coming for most of the year.  I’ve stated a lot that the money has dropped significantly in terms of royalties and this might be it unless War of Nytefall took off like a rocket.  My hope was to work my ass off to go down fighting and start working towards the other path around November.  Current situations have forced my hand faster than I’d like, so I spent a lot of the week researching jobs and mourning.  I am happy that a lot of people have offered to help me do promotions every few months to keep me active.  There are also a bunch of volunteers for War of Nytefall: Lost, which could end up being my last book for a while.  Thank you so much for that because it makes me feel like I’m not dead yet.

Miracle Max from Princess Bride

I want to talk about the future.  Let me make this a bit easier and do sections to stop myself from rambling:

Writing/Publishing

As it stands right now, I won’t be doing much writing because things are too chaotic.  I also can’t get my head right to do more than daydream.  Keep fearing that touching a notebook will cause trouble, so I’ve put all of them on a shelf.  When things settle, I’ll probably go back to outlining and preparing other series for the possibility of a return.  For those who want to say that I can’t give up and need to keep writing, there are things going on that prevent that right now.  So, no amount of pep talks are going to get me back into the ideas until maybe mid-September.

With publishing, I have War of Nytefall: Lost coming out without question.  The third volume will have to wait until maybe spring of 2019 if I can even do it then.  It’s written, but not edited and I don’t have the heart to go into it right now.  Even if I could, I need to redirect my attention to job hunting and can’t go full bore (boar?) into preparing a book for publishing. Lost has already been edited, has blurbs to be tested tomorrow, and the cover art.  So, I’m probably going to be writing for myself more than others for a bit.  Kind of a hard pill to swallow.

The Blog and Social Media

I’ll be keeping up with the daily pinned Tweet, but it might be only retweeting in early mornings and night.  Depends on the job and schedule I get.  The blog is going to be something different.  The ‘Goal Posts’ will continue and I’ll be repeatedly making offers to host guest posts.  I have everything scheduled through October too, but that might only be guest posts and the Raven finale.  Monster Maker would require more time than I have at this time and I won’t be able to get to comments so quickly to do character interviews.  Feel like this is going to hurt me the most.  After October, I’m not sure what I can do as far as posts.  A Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule still requires time and I don’t know what I would write.  I considered doing Teaser Tuesdays every week, but choose from any of my books instead of just the most recent one.

There are two other blog options that require their own paragraph.  I finished writing Derailing Bedlam a while back and never published it.  That can be made a weekly blog post and I can do the same with Ichabod Brooks once Lloyd and Cassidy are done.  This is a tough one since ‘Bedlam’ is an outlier for me since it isn’t fantasy and a higher rating than the others.  Yet, I don’t have any of the new Ichabod Brooks stories written.  I could start working on those and hit January with one on Monday and one on Friday.  This is only if I can get my head and heart together to start writing them.  It also abandons November and December.   I can’t do any interactive back-and-forth interviews, but maybe I can do a poll to get favorite characters from all my series.  Then, I’ll put a post up for people to leave questions and do the answer post a few days later.  Just throwing things against the wall.  I would really appreciate any suggestions for post topics and ideas.

Health

My health has taken a hit here.  Lost my appetite for a few days and I’ve been averaging 2-3 hours of sleep a night.  Finally got a 5 hour snooze last night, but only because I was so exhausted.  I worry that this is going to make job hunting even harder.  Doesn’t help that I have no idea what I’m doing.

Jobs

This is the tough one because my son is still on summer break.  I expected the last few weeks to be me getting him mentally and emotionally ready for 4th grade.  Last year, he was having fun until the day before school when he abruptly became terrified of getting on the bus.  I was aiming to work hard on preventing a repeat, but that’s not possible if I’m working or rushing off to interviews.  It throws chaos into his life, which is when he begins acting out and regressing.  My hope is that I can find a way to work from home for a little bit and start the real hunting once he’s back in school.  Anything that I can do in the morning, at night, and when he’s at school would be ideal.  I’m going to check out Flexjobs, which is a site dedicated to remote jobs.  Proofreading, data entry, and the like are where my strengths are going to come in handy.  If this does work out then maybe I can combine that with a part-time position, but it’s going to be taking things by steps.  I keep wanting to factor writing into this, but I know I shouldn’t.  For now, I’m going to push for enough time that my son is ready for school and try for a few work-at-home gigs.  That’s the plan for now.

This post has gotten pretty long and I want to end it with a list of goals, but I’ve got nothing.  Feels like a lot of traditions are going to end this year.  Raven is done, publishing 4 books a year won’t happen, Monster Maker can’t be accomplished, and the whole thing feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.  Guess the plus side is that I haven’t been desperate enough to answer one of those ‘we found your resume’ emails.  Those never end well.