The Excitement Ebb and Flow

This time last week I was super excited about my new project:  the Grandpa Anarchy website, where I proposed to publish one new Grandpa Anarchy story online each week.  I had published a new story on Sunday and then written two more stories in the next two days.  In the back of my mind I knew I needed a good backlog of stories -- despite my best efforts I don't actually write a story every week, and sometimes I've gone for months without writing anything -- but I really wanted to publish another story right away.  Having just one story up on the site was bugging me -- I was impatient to reach the point where the blog had a good backlog of stories.

I convinced myself that I could publish one "classic" Grandpa Anarchy story a month.  I didn't want to burn through my backlog of stories -- I want to publish most of those in actual books rather than online, and force myself to write new stories for the blog -- but one story a month seemed fair enough.  I published a second story on Thursday, taken from my earliest collection of stories, and that satisfied my urge to publish more.

And then... I got stuck on my fourth story, and didn't write on the weekend.  Sunday came before I knew it and I wasn't ready to even think about what to put up on the blog.  By Monday I'd written next to nothing, just a few extra lines on the story I was in theory working on, and I was having doubts about the two stories I'd actually written.  I mean, I wrote them a week ago, nobody else had seen them, were they even worth putting up?  One in particular called Write Your Way Out seemed very weak.  Eventually I published the other one late Monday -- after reading through it again and editing slightly, I decided  I liked it fairly well -- but I was worried again that I could really manage to do this, and feeling like I had no backlog.

I don't really get depressed as a rule.  But I was certainly feeling a lot less excited about my new blog, and worried that I might eventually stop working on it.  That had always been a concern and that's what I initially wasn't going to launch it until I had an already-written backlog of stories.

Today I finally broke through on Presentation, the story I'd been trying to write for a week.  I think it works pretty well.  Of course, I usually think stories I've just finished writing work pretty well, but  I may have also thought of a better way to go back and fix Write Your Way Out, and I have more ideas for stories.  If I can get one or two more written before Sunday, I'll be in a pretty good position, with almost a month's worth of stories waiting for the site.

It's amazing how much finishing a story improves my mood.  ^_^

I think ultimately I should try to maintain a backlog of about a dozen stories -- three months worth.  But if I can manage two more stories this week, that'll be a start.  In the meantime I'm feeling much more optimistic about getting more writing done.