For the month of June I will be doing a focus project called The Pirate and the Clumsy Mage. On the side I’ll also continue editing TAS and hopefully be on to editing either The Doll or Rose in the Woods either mid-wayish through the month or at least be ready to go by the end of the month.

My primary goal is to get my writing numbers up and if I can’t, I’ll have to adjust my expectations. What I’ll be doing over the next couple of days is what I should have done on Sunday, which is reflect on the goals I set out for May and whether or not I achieved them or if I still have to work on them.

June Goals

June is going to revolve around finishing up with uni and getting back into my own writing and my other creative writing projects like my DND Campaign. I want to get back to Monthly Focus projects and I want to be on time for this one as well. Last month the focuses were: culling, editing, transferring and preparing. There were a few bumps in the road for last months goals but I more or less made progress. I’m still in the middle of culling and transferring my files but have been sorting them better. The hiccups there are to do with formatting styling that I’ve done in certain projects that I can’t quite change over to Scrivener. Eventually I want to move most of my work over to Scrivener but I also have to consider things like submissions preferring doc files, and how some of the files might not work well in Scrivener because of formatting. I will still be switching over to it as my main writing program eventually but I just have to iron some things out.

• Write More

I want to write more this month. I wrote bugger all in May and am kind of dispirited about it, having to keep reminding myself that I had other things going on and was making progress in many other areas of my life. I think i’m worrying that a dry period is coming, and though it’s something that’s normal in a way, not being able to really write isn’t a great time.

• Focus Writing

I want to make sure my Focus Writing for the month are on time and progressing well this month. I have a pretty good idea of where The Pirate and the Clumsy Mage will be starting and ending up but I worry that I either might get carried away or won’t maintain motivation to write about it. My last assignments are due next week and so I will be free of that stress (not entirely until my grades are released and I’ve passed the semester) and will hopefully be able to focus on writing.

• Continuing the Sorting

I’m going to continue sorting out my writing files and try to figure out something I can do to smoothly transfer over the rest of the projects that I want to. I’ve sorted them out for transferring in terms of their importance and potential and will not be transferring anything that I no longer deem interesting or to have reader potential. All of those extra files will be archived to my Google Drive and finally removed from my writing One Drive. I’m hoping that I will actually get this done before the second half of the year comes around.

• Write More Diversely

I want to write in a lot of different forms but haven’t really done much in the past year except write in prose, poetry and in my DND Campaign. I think it’s a mixture of lack of experience and confidence in experimenting with essays and journalistic pieces. I also feel like it’s a bit of a ‘cop out’ to post my assignments here and pretend like those are my little flairs of different styles of writing. I think the issue is also that this is my professional profile that I’m building but it’s also my personal development as a student, writer and person and so I’m definitely going to have pieces that might either be biased or slightly misinformed because I don’t exactly have a lot of real life experience. At the base line: I don’t want to be torn apart in the future by developmental pieces. I don’t think I’ll write anything where I will be ethically or morally ashamed of but the idea of ‘cancel culture’ does kind of put a little fear in me. I don’t want to have my development as a person and writer misconstrued in any way and I actually think I don’t have the confidence in myself to do that, which is strange to acknowledge and dwell on. I think it’s also about not completely knowing who I am yet (although I have made significant progress recently).

This got really wordy but basically what I wanted to say is: I don’t know enough about the world just yet and don’t want to write anything ignorant as a result of that.

• Build my Confidence as a Writer

This is probably a good one to put in here. I know my stance but I don’t know my stance. I have a set of base morals that underpin who I am as a person and they inform who I am as a writer. The difference is that I’m not entirely sure how to take my stance on certain things as a person and so am even a little more lost on how to do it as a writer. I want to build my confidence as a writer so I can take a stand as a writer.

And those are the overarching goals I have for June. Let’s get these pages filled and this confidence built. Write! Write! Write!