I spent some time while I was supposed to be putting up Christmas lights this evening instead thinking about what I want to do next year from a writing perspective.

And I suppose I’m a bit torn because as it usually happens, very much at random I came up with an idea for a new project that I think could be a lot of fun and it might even have that highly coveted money making appeal, but like anything it would be another thing to fight for my time and my time is by far right now my greatest asset!

…particularly with two new little boys added to the collection, though for what it’s worth said project kind of involves the whole family, so there’s that…

The thing is, I’m certainly not ready to drop any of the other creative projects that I’m currently working on – in fact, part of my analysis includes really getting each of those up to the weekly word counts that they deserve instead of just limping some of them along and writing for them when I feel like it. Granted I’ve been doing been with some than others lately, but truth be told what I really need to do is get back to a proper writing schedule and follow it so that I’m hitting deadlines for everything on the list, not just my weekly humor column.

Which I’m honestly very happy with how it’s been going lately and may partially explain why I want more of that feeling!

There’s a lot to be said for organization and actually having a method behind one’s creative madness, and admittedly that’s been very hit and miss for me over the years because sometimes I’ll find that outlining my week creatively really helps to give me the structure I need to get a larger volume of writing done and sometimes it just completely overwhelms and stifles the entire thing.

But I know that it has to be done if I’m going to take on anything else because with my time so limited as it is, right now I’m not doing all of the existing stuff that I want to do, much less add something new. Yet there’s something immensely satisfying being able to look back at a completed week and say, “Wow – I really got a lot done!” and it becomes even more compounded when I look at it for an entire year.

I often times glance back at the word count shown in the sidebar of my blog and even though I haven’t been writing there nearly as much lately, it’s kind of amazing seeing that count slowly creeping towards 1,000,000 words blogged!

I want to have that feeling for all of the creative work that I do.

(And as a very random side note, I think one of my other new projects for 2017 is going to be finally figuring out a way to compile word count stats for everything that I do so that I can throw them up on a big screen in my office and let their slowly rising numbers motivate me to write even more… 😉 )