When I finally got around to sharing my list of goals for January, I was already halfway through the month and a lot of them were done. I won’t rehash what I talked about there, but I will say I’m pleased with the overall amount of work I got done in the first month of the year. After I reviewed the pile of sticky notes in my “complete” bowl that I pulled off my kanban board, I finished a total of 36 important tasks in the month of January–which meant I accomplished at least one task every day of the month, plus a little extra.

Some of those were big feats–things like getting business licenses and completing edits on Serpent’s Mark, which ended up being just shy of 104,000 words when work was complete. Whew.  The book still needs to be proofread, so it’s a ways out from being done, but I’ve started figuring out the layout for the digital edition of the book and I’ll tackle print editions after proofing is done, but everything is still on time right now.

I also ended up finishing as much as I could of the kitchen. Replacing the flooring is outside of my control, as we’re still waiting for a quote from a contractor so we can finish our damage claims, but that’s the only thing remaining to be done in that room.

Despite being the shortest month of the year, February has more goals than January. I’m not sure if all of them will get done, but if they don’t, whatever is left will be deferred to March. Here’s everything I hope to do…

Goal category 1: Publishing

Publish To Steal the Crown.
The second book in the Westkings Heist series is due to go out on February 22. This one should be a cakewalk, since all that’s left is having the book actually go live!

Finish and format Serpent’s Mark.
This means proofreading and final adjustments to the manuscript, then getting the ebook put together and ordering print proofs. If I can do a chapter a day, I should have a week left at the end of the month to handle formatting and ordering of proofs. I’d prefer to go a little faster than that, but we’ll see.

Write To Steal the Queen.
The third and final installment of the Westkings Heist trilogy is officially underway! Aiming for 50,000 words in a month is a tall order for me, but I’m going to do my best to get it done. It’s okay if this runs a little ways into March, but hopefully it won’t take that long. I’ll be sharing updates on how TSQ is going somewhere around mid-month.

Goal category 2: Finishing the house

This is the one where a lot of huge work waits…

Finish the studio.
There’s not a lot left to be done here, mostly just painting. Ideally it’s something I can finish in a day or two, but we’ll see.

Paint the gym.
This is technically the third bedroom, but since we don’t really need the space, it’s become Joe’s workout room and has all his equipment in it. The walls are a rather unpleasant brown, and full of holes, as well. I won’t be worrying about woodwork or doors yet, but the goal is to repair the walls and get them painted.

Finish the front room.
This is technically the dining room, but since there are only 3 of us, we eat in the kitchen and don’t need this space. All that really needs to be done is cleaning really well and getting this room nicely arranged so that it’s useful, instead of being a catch-all room where all the home improvement supplies are stored.

Paint main bathroom.
The previous owners had painted over whatever color was in the bathroom, but they did a terrible job. The paint is really streaky and blotchy and a muddy greenish-gray color comes through in places. This is the smaller of the bathrooms, so I want to keep it as bright as possible. Fortunately, one coat of a good quality white paint should take care of it.

Goal category 3: Improving my health without sacrificing my work

Ever hard to quantify, the big goal for this one this month is finding time to do something fun in between all the work. My dear friend Ashley gave me a stay-wet acrylic palette for my birthday last month, so I plan to work out time for an acrylic landscape painting some time this month.

I’d say that’s it for me, but it’s kind of a tall order. Maybe March needs to be slower?

I’d originally thought I’d write about this early in the month, but the holidays were rather off-kilter and I ended up being a little behind on everything. Hopefully this year will be better balanced from beginning to end.

Last week, I mentioned my list of goals for the year. They’re big when written down as one lump achievement, but easier to address when breaking things down on a month-by-month basis. I figured this month would be the hard one, since it’s me getting into the swing of work after several weeks of no school and no set schedule. We’re already halfway in, but it hasn’t been as bad as I thought. I’d plan small tasks moving me toward my yearly goals, and honestly, most of what I wanted to do this month is already done.

Here are my tasks, along with a little breakdown of where I am on them right now. I plan to check in at the beginning of each month from here out, sharing my goals for the month and what I accomplished off the previous month’s list.

Goal #1 is publishing.

Publish To Steal the World: Check.
While the book won’t officially be out until January 26, the book is done, uploaded, and it’s actually already up for preorder. 😉 Since I’ve already done all the work required to make this happen, I’ve marked it off.

Finish Serpent’s Blood revisions and prep to send for editing: Check.
I actually wrote down this goal before the end of 2019, and I finished this at the very end of December. I didn’t expect to be marking off 2020 goals before 2020 started, but I won’t complain.

Edit and format To Steal the Crown: Check.
This didn’t take near as much time as I expected it would, which I’ll take as a good thing. I finished formatting last week, and like with TSW, this one’s ready to go and does not need to be touched again.

So basically, all my January tasks for goal #1 are already done! That was suspiciously easy…

Goal #2 is completing all renovations and repairs on the house.

This one’s a little tougher, because some of it doesn’t depend on me…

All boxes unpacked: Check.
With the exception of stuff that stays in storage in the attic, we finally unpacked the last few things, meaning all our stuff is officially where it belongs. Until I decide to move it again when I rearrange stuff.

Clean and organize the library: Check.
There are a lot of empty shelves and I need some more attractive storage options for some stuff that’s currently just piled on shelves instead of being in pretty baskets or something, but my library loft looks super nice. We even pitched a tent up there for the munchkin to use as her private reading hideout.

Organize my closet: Check.
I didn’t think that one would be challenging, but the closet we have now is practically the size of my studio at the old house. You could definitely stick a bed in there and call it another room. Wild! It’s tidy and the floor is totally clear, so since you can find everything and walk around easily, I’m not going to worry about the Halloween costumes hanging in there, too. I mean, it’s a good place for them.

Finish the kitchen: Unfinished.
Here’s the hard one. Right before Christmas, our brand new dishwasher malfunctioned, flooded the kitchen and dining room, and ruined the flooring. I’ve been without flooring since then, but we’re buried in paperwork trying to get the dishwasher manufacturer to take responsibility for their defective product and make them replace the floor. We’re still waiting for a contractor to get out here, but hopefully that will be this week, and while I HOPE we’ll have a new floor by the end of the month, I’m not holding my breath. So the list of what I can do here is considerably shorter: I need to primer and paint the woodwork. I hope to primer this week and paint next week. The flooring… well, hopefully it’ll be done in a timely fashion.

Then there’s goal 3, which is the hardest to quantify and track…

Goal #3 is working to improve my health without sacrificing my work.

Gosh, how to set tasks for this one? I didn’t–I figured this would be easier to just monitor and review at the end of the month to see where my main sources of stress are, then work to eliminate them. I’ve made a goal of being sure to exercise 3 times a week at least, and I seem to be doing okay on that front. I also tried making it a goal to take one night off from work and just sit and read or play a game or just hang out, but so far, that’s causing me more stress than it’s reducing, so I’m not sure that will work for me long-term. I’ll take stock at the end of the month. For the moment, the biggest target I have in relation to this goal is taking a personal day to do stuff like shop for the year’s clothes and maybe get a drink at a cafe or something while Eevee’s at school. I’m planning that one for next week, mostly because I have coupons to use while I’m out that are only good in that time frame. 😛

So really, I only have two things left to do this month to stay on-target for what I want to achieve this year.

I have other goals that I haven’t quite figured out yet, like determining what I’m doing with my doll projects and YouTube videos, but I do intend to start sharing more of that stuff in blog posts just because it’s so much easier for me to have everything in one place. Maybe I’ll start next week, when I should have a new sewing pattern to share… we’ll see.

What are your goals for the first month of the year?

As seems to happen once a year or so, YouTube has been in a bit of an uproar over some platform changes made under the claim of adhering to COPPA regulations. There are a thousand things I could say about the situation, but they’ve already been said by people much more knowledgable and articulate than me. It would also deviate a bit from what this post is really about, so instead, I’ll stay on topic.

I will give you a brief summary of how it affected me, because that part’s important: I share my dolls here sometimes, though I mostly share them on YouTube. It’s a very visual platform and the dolls themselves are highly visual things. But because they’re dolls, I slipped into a gap with a lot of creators like me. Because of the medium I work with, turning dolls into art, my work was labeled as child-targeting content. While I was able to mitigate some of the impact by making quick changes to things and ensuring all my videos were labeled as not intended for children, there were some I couldn’t recover. The videos are still there, but practically invisible. The worst part of the situation? I saw it coming, but I still allowed myself to be unprepared.

I was guilty of something known as outposting. I’d made YouTube the hub of my creative platform for my dolls, instead of building my own platform from scratch. When you play in someone else’s field, you have to play by their rules, too. And when they decide it’s time to send you packing, there’s rarely anything you can do. But all those sandcastles you built while you were there? Yeah—you have to say goodbye. You leave them behind, and all your audience, too.

I am familiar with the dangers of outposting. Like most people who adopted the internet in the late 90s, I’ve seen more than my fair share of perfectly good sites shuttered. I saw Geocities collapse, watched MySpace fade away, watched instant messaging platforms like AIM and MSN Messenger disappear.

Yet despite knowing the risks, I was complacent and I let YouTube’s changes—which don’t even really follow COPPA!—endanger the security of my artistic platform. It’s easy to fall into the complacency trap; platforms like YouTube come with a built-in audience who is already there and looking for what you can provide. The site is easy to use and makes things simple. Who could want more?

They say the internet is forever, but it’s not. A wealth of information and a massive number of contacts have been lost due to platforms closing. Most of those connections will never be made again, because they took place on a platform outside of your control. This is what almost happened to me with YouTube. For those unsure what the changes entail, it means any videos labeled as kids’ content—including videos like mine, which are erroneously labeled—are removed from things like user subscriptions, and users are no longer able to leave comments, which means creators hit by this issue are unable to interact with their community. For a lot of content creators, me included, this is crippling. The stuff I do with my dolls, I do because I want to help other hobbyists learn to do the same things. If they have no way to contact me, or YouTube were to shutter—which it eventually, someday, will—then everything I’ve done over the past 3 years would be lost.

The good news is it’s not hard to combat that risk. It can be a little time consuming, but the end results are usually worth it.

So how do you combat outposting?

The answer is simple—keep the heart of your platform grounded somewhere you control. For me, that’s this site. I update the thing myself. Me and my husband are the only people who have access to it. I run regular backups, so even if my website host were to suddenly go under, I could move all of my content easily and be back up within a matter of days.

Keeping backups is important. I keep backup copies of all my videos for when there are options other than YouTube, or for when YouTube someday goes down. Right now, YouTube is the only place you can find my videos, which is a little unfortunate, because it’s in violation of one of the other internet best practices for platforming:

Diversify where you can be found. This is why, even though I plan to launch all my books in 2020 into Kindle Unlimited, they will eventually end their term and will be available on all platforms. Because Amazon will someday fall. Even Jeff Bezos has said as much. If you have to use social media (And you should, because it offers great visibility) you should be available on multiple platforms. Though I use some platforms more than others, I can be found on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. I also have accounts places like deviantART, Flickr, Blogger, and Tumblr. Even if one platform goes down, anyone who follows me would be able to locate me on any of those other platforms.

Point everything back to you. This is something I’m going to be working on more in the coming months. In the past, I tried to keep my interest divided for sake of keeping things tidy, but all I really do now is write books and then make dolls into characters from the books. There’s no reason those two things can’t be unified, so in 2020, I’m going to go ahead and unify them. I’ll start documenting some of my projects here, in addition to social media sites like Instagram and outposts like YouTube, because if anything happens to my work on YouTube, my existing projects will also be catalogued here… and easy to find.

Plus, it gives me more things to talk about. As excited as I am to let people know I edited over 10,000 words of the sixth Snakesblood Saga book yesterday, that’s an update that probably belongs on social media… because I can’t think of anything long enough to write that would justify posting it here.

75% done, though. Snakesblood 6 should be done by the end of the year.