Three Months of The Mutable

If I were feeling particularly facetious, I might refer to this as a quarterly review; frankly, I'm just feeling gassy and still a bit sick, so let's move this along.

This most recent update marks the twelfth consecutive week of the mutable, my program of self-publication. At the end of the day, this is what everything else is all about: fulfilling my dream of making my living off creative works alone. There have been ups and downs, and I've learned a great deal, but I want one thing to be made clear above all else: I am deeply grateful for the experience thus far.

In purely monetary terms, the venture is off to the sort of slow start I had predicted. I currently have two sponsors averaging roughly $4/week, which puts me at 0.89% of my goal. Thankfully, the reasons for this are quite obvious: the page is barely visible as far as the internet at large is concerned. In three months, it has received 363 pageviews, of which at least half appear to be from bots/crawlers of some sort. The means most readily available to me for correcting this are:

A) Migrating the content to my VPS as soon as possible
B) Putting content up on Youtube that directs attention to the writing
C) Linking to the site wherever possible

Both B and C make a lot more sense if A is already accomplished. I had really hoped to have this taken care of three weeks ago, which segues neatly into the second point of review: output.

Both in terms of volume of writing and secondary endeavors, my output continues to be a disappointment to me. There's always some distraction cropping up that I allow to completely derail me, to the extent that for two weeks in a row, I failed to put out any new prose, and that after weeks of missing the actual word count goal. Having managed to update with some new prose these past two weeks, I'm still well behind the volume of output I'm aiming for. This just comes down to effort and discipline.

Meanwhile, I've done far less drawing than I'd like, and haven't even embarked on language study yet. I've also not made any meaningful progress with coding. Here, what's lacking is a set of small, day-to-day manageable goals. In the case of drawing, just saying I'm going to sit down and draw for an hour might be fine, provided I was more experienced. At this novice stage, though, I need to be focusing primarily on exercises that help me build the fundamentals: gesture drawing, shape and form construction, straight lines, perspectives--and maybe mix some free drawing time in there. Meanwhile, saying I'm going to practice a given language or 'study coding' for an hour is a functionally useless description. My goals needn't necessarily be ultra-precise, but just having any at all would help with both motivation and perspective.

The more rigorous planning I've been wanting to switch to continues to elude me, in part because my failure to keep up with my schedule leaves me rushing to catch up on Sunday and Monday--both of the days I'd use for planning and relaxation otherwise. With the half-month remaining, I hope to focus on streamlining my process so that I can enter 2014 with a clear vision of what the mutable really is, execute on it swiftly, and bring myself that much closer to my dream.

Still learning,
~L