February Update

Now that February has given way to March, I wanted to write about all the stuff I accomplished last month and a little about the rest of 2023. I spend a lot of time on here talking about my goals and looking forward, but I don’t think I look enough at what I’ve accomplished. Not that I’ve done a whole lot, but it’s a little encouraging, you know?

Before I get to February, I want to say one big goal I met in January was getting caught up with my critique group’s work and finally rejoining the group. I stepped back from it while I got Old School Evil: The Rejects out and then continued my break through Christmas, but getting back into our groups bi-weekly meetings has been a godsend. I’m still not submitting anything of my own to the group just yet, but being able to talk to someone about writing is always a good thing.

In February, my big goal for the month was to finish the first draft to Old School Evil 3 and then do a read-through and get the third draft out of the way. Of course, it never happened, but I made some progress on the book, writing about 5-6k words and, most importantly, getting the Reject’s introductory scene plotted out and written in a way that I think works really well. The current draft has about 29k words and will end up at about 75k, like the previous two books. I originally planned to finish the first draft from where I left off, but I think I’m changing that plan and will edit what I have written now so I can start submitting to my group again, and just write and edit as I go along. I don’t have a real deadline for finishing the first draft at the moment, though.

Another thing I feel good about accomplishing is getting several articles written for my blog here and on The Retro Network. I posted two on each site in January and just posted another for each this week. My goal for the year is to post 20 articles on the Retro Network (no specific goal for my site since I’m thinking of changing gears on it). I appreciate so much being invited to write for TRN and this year, I’m hoping to do a lot more than I did before. I’ve got a few different articles planned for it and I’m also repurposing some of my old blog posts as well.

Another thing I did recently was get back on Instagram. I’m hoping I don’t run into the same problem of people trying to hack my account as last time. Anyway, I decided to try getting into toy photography and post it there. I recently posted a photo of my 80s cartoon bad guys and it’s getting a lot more attention than I expected. I bought a light box and will hopefully start posting some more photos this month.

Last, I changed up the landing page for Old School Evil: The Rejects by adding a quote from Realweegiemidge’s review and made up some images to post on social media. Honestly, I’ve only used one on Facebook as I’m not sure how to use them on Twitter or Instagram, but I’m learning, so expect to see those soon. They’re not much, but I’m hoping they will help.

So that’s been the last two months here. I think it’s been a good amount of progress, honestly, but there’s always room for improvement. This month I’m planning to rewrite chapter 1 of Old School Evil 3 and get it in my critique group’s hands as soon as possible. I’m hoping to finish Tommy and the Order of Cosmic Champions and get a review out there (Sorry it’s taken so long, Tony!), so that I can move on to some other reading projects. I have James Rolfe’s Movie Making Nerd to read then Save the Cat, a book about writing screenplays. I’m hoping once I get through those, I can return to Cel to Silver, my cartoon adaptation series, and in a new format as well. Again, I hope we’ll see how that goes. And as always, I’m hoping to watch more cartoons.

Make sure to pick up Old School Evil and Old School Evil: The Rejects on Amazon here.