Greetings Backers!

TL:DR:
Revision is progressing nicely! I'm about 1/3 done, but I expect the middle 1/3 to take less time. You can see a chapter-by-chapter report down below. You can also read the full chapter on Priorities by clicking over to read this update on Backerkit and making sure you're logged in. Your next update will be the week of November 11-15

Details:

Going by wordcount, I'm about a third of the way done with this revision pass. I expect this middle third to go much faster than the first third did because I won't need to completely deconstruct and re-make all of the chapters the way I had to for the early ones. There are some chapters at the end which might be more work, I'll have to see when I get there. 

I reached out to my editor and I'm getting a bid on a "Substantive Edit" which will dig in chapter by chapter to make sure each one is fully formed. I'll have to do a cost / benefit analysis based on the bid and the sample edit that she supplies. Such is always the case when creating projects, we have to decided how much is enough.  As much as I might wish for infinite resources of time, energy, and money, I have to make do with what is actually available. The chapters I've revised are already so much better than they were before. I'm going to let all you backers read the chapter on Priorities in full. You can access it by clicking over to Backerkit and making sure you're logged in when you read this update. 

Here is where things stand based on the table of contents:

Intro (I'll write this last)
Creativity and Dreams

Prioritizing

Energy

Productivity

Making Changes

Personalization

Conclusion

You may note that I've got three chapters "in progress." I've discovered that when I'm stuck on one chapter I can sometimes bounce to another one and make progress on that. Then when I bounce back to the first one sometimes I'm not stuck anymore. 

I've put design work for stickers and notebooks on hold for right now. Trying push everything forward all at once was making me frazzled and wasn't actually getting things done faster. If I have brain for complex thinking, I'm spending it on revising instead of design work. I'll catch up on the design work when the manuscript is back in the hands of an editor. Thank you so much for making it possible to give this project so much of my focus. It is because of your support that I'm able to give it my first attention instead of my third or fourth. 

All the best,
Sandra

Greetings backers!

TL:DR: Revision is in progress. I'm going to focus down in October and get this revision pass done. I've given you a sample from the chapter about Dreams. Your next update will be the week of October 21-25.

I wanted to check in with all of you after my big trip to let you know where things are with this project. I rarely get any work done during the Writing Excuses workshops because I am too occupied with staff duties and care work. That was not the case this time, which makes me very happy. I worked on the book consistently through the whole trip.

One of my revision tasks was to take the giant chapter where I covered Dreams, Goals, and Priorities and turn it into separate chapters for each of those concepts. This required pulling apart ideas, deciding which ideas go where, building a new "spine" of thought for each chapter and then reassembling everything so it makes sense. The result is going to be far more comprehensible and useful for all of you backers to read, but it has been a lot of slow, thinky work.

Writing it out like that, helps me see why the process for these early chapters is taking so much longer than I wanted it to. I feel the clock ticking in my head and there is a near constant stream of thought about how I should be working faster. Yet it isn't the existence of other things in my life that is preventing me from working as fast as I want to, it is the fact that I have to walk away from the work and let the thoughts percolate before I can see how to fix them. So I push words around, then I let them sit, then I push them around, then I do something else, then I come back and have an aha moment. Slowly I get to a place where I'm confident that the words say what I need them to. 

Fortunately most of the chapters won't need this level of deconstruction and reconstruction. I'm very hopeful that I'll be able to fly through revision on later chapters. In fact I'm starting to work ahead on easier chapters while the more complicated chapters are percolating. 

The other thing I am doing is paying attention to activities which might use up the percolation space in my brain. I skipped sending out my monthly Newsletter in September, I've let my blog and Patreon sit in idle mode for now. I'm posting on social media less. All of which is the result of giving this project first crack at my available writing energy. 

A thing that is giving me hope relating to this project is the conversations I've had with people during consultations, group mentoring, or even at the in-person retreat I attended. Each of these conversations is a treasure. I keep wanting to shove chapters into the hands of people who those chapters might help. So the urgency I feel to get this project done isn't just guilt around not meeting the (ambitious) deadlines I said I would hit, it is that this book can't begin to be helpful until it exists. It can't exist until I do the work.

So that is what October is about for me. I'm not going on any trips and my other projects are mostly in resting phases. I get to spend October finishing the revision on Structuring Life to Support Creativity and I'm going to schedule my time around that as the central project. I'm also going to make time to record some of the presentations that I've promised.

Thank you so much for joining me on this adventure. Your next update will be the week of October 21-25.  Down below I'm including a backers-only snippet from the beginning of the chapter on Dreams. 
Hope you enjoy!
Sandra Tayler

Greetings!

I had an ambitious plan for two weeks of productive work on SLSC. I failed at all of it. I did not finish a single item on my SLSC to do list because all of my efforts were pulled into work on the Schlock Mercenary book my husband and I are sending to print soon, also into extra babysitting for my daughter whose house had a plumbing adventure, also there was a bunch of medical stuff which I'm going to be non-specific about in this update except to say chronic conditions are hard, also there was emotional processing around that medical stuff, also I'm just tired. But even if I can't report piles of progress, I can make sure to report instead of giving you silence. Sometimes we don't get to be the creative people we want to be. 

I love the quote from Mary Anne Radmacher "Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is that quiet voice at the end of the day that says 'I'll try again tomorrow'."  So, I'll try again tomorrow, and all of next week. 

Starting Monday I have multiple consultations and mentoring sessions scheduled, which will definitely help me keep my head in the space where I'm thinking about SLSC. I've also arranged most of my days so that SLSC gets morning brain instead of hoping to have brain in the afternoon.  The week after that I board a plane to be a staff member for the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat. That event is specifically designed around helping people write, so I intend to use the structure of it to help me get work done. 

I hope to post a quick update during the event, and I'll give you all a full status report on October 2-3, by which time I plan to have the book fully revised and ready for line edits. 

Thank you for coming along for this journey, even the doldrum-y bits.
Sandra Tayler

Greetings Backers,

Weeks go by fast for me because all of my days are full of overlapping task lists for multiple projects. Then there are the projects that pop up and surprise me. I hadn't planned on a full-bore project to clean and re-organize my office, but that happened. Sometimes I have to just roll with it when my brain says "we need to do this NOW" and I suspect that my subconscious knew something about what I needed in order to get this book done because I'm now happily sitting in my office space to work instead of avoiding it because the clutter makes me feel guilty. 

For my last update I created a two week task list and it was really beneficial in helping me steer myself toward getting things done, so I'm going to repeat that.  If you compare the lists from my last update, you'll see that some things got rolled forward instead of completed. That is inevitable when working with complex and overlapping projects.

Week of September 2-6

I was so nervous to read my edit letter, especially when I saw that it was 29 pages long. I picked a day when I had space to work through any feelings that I had. Then I read it... and was encouraged. My editor made some suggestions that I won't take because they feel wrong to me, but the vast majority of her notes are ones I agree will make the book better. So I just need to dig in and start applying them.

One thing my editor did not know is that I have additional material to draft that she didn't get to see. I decided to go ahead and get that drafting done first so that it sits in place for the edit pass. I can already tell that the edit notes are shaping how I draft these new sections and it means the edit on those segments will be simpler when I get to them. 

I'm really enjoying the process of drafting the additional chapters. I love collecting information and figuring out how to present it usefully.

My two week schedule is ambitious. My hope to have the edits complete by the end of September is also ambitious. Particularly since I need to do production and design work on things like the notebooks. I have a really cool idea for the sticker sheets that I need to spend time figuring out. And of course I have family and business projects that have nothing to do with SLSC except they require creative energy from me.

This morning I woke up with the thought "Do I have to do all the things today? Can't I just rest?"  I need to listen to that gentle voice of fatigue and honor it sometimes. I've lowered my expectations for myself today and I've planned nothing at all productive for the weekend. So, yes I'm stating the ambitious schedule, but on a daily basis I will make decisions for long-term creative health rather than always pushing to meet the goal.

That's my update for today. As a treat for reading to the end, I offer this glimpse of my office space where I've finally framed and hung the art that has been sitting around in piles.

Having art on my wall brings me joy.
Thank you for joining me!
Sandra

Greetings Backers,

I'm just now emerging from two weeks of Gen Con prep, attendance, and aftermath. I'm staggering around and trying to remember what was going on before the convention took over every waking thought. If you'd like to know how the convention went, I wrote about it in my Newsletter that I cross posted to my Patreon. Today I am re-engaging with this book project, remembering what I was doing, and making a task list for myself so that I can stay on track with getting everything done. 

In order to keep the task list from feeling too overwhelming on a day when I'm picking up the dropped pieces of multiple ongoing projects, I'm keeping it focused on the tasks I want to accomplish between now and the next time I give you a quick update in about two weeks.

Mon - Tues next week: 

Wed - Friday next week:

Week of Aug 19-23

The edit letter arrived three days before I was due to jump into the car for my big Gen Con trip. Reading an edit letter is often an occasion for a huge attack of imposter syndrome or self doubt. I knew that I did not want to potentially unbalance myself right before a big and stressful effort. So I've let the letter sit with the plan to dig into it starting next Monday. I need to know what my editor thinks, but I'm setting myself up to receive those thoughts in a constructive way instead of stressing over them. I'm a little bit anxious. What if everything I wrote is terrible? What if I can't fix it? What if...  I could come up with a lot of those. But next week I've cleared a space and I'll just get to work.

Other than writing up this post and sending some emails, I'm taking the rest of this week to unpack, do laundry, set my house right side up, send emails to follow up on conversations at Gen Con, and remember where I was on multiple ongoing projects. But I do have one happy thing to show you!

I got a sample of the notebook that comes as part of the creativity bundle:

There is still design work to do around the image, but this test was to find out the general quality of what the supplier can give me. I love it. I'm going to be able to let people choose blank, dot grid, or lined pages. It has a pocket in the back, an elastic closure, and a ribbon. In the final version I may make the image smaller and include a quote from the book as part of the design. If I do, I'll let you all vote on what the text should say. 

If you didn't get a creativity bundle, you'll have the chance to add it or to just add a notebook when you fill out your surveys in September.  by then I also want to have some images for the stickers and the custom designed notebook as well. I have lots to do on a tight timeline, but I'm excited that I get to do it. 

Thank you for joining me!
Sandra