Singlemindedness

To succeed in your mission, you must have single-minded devotion to your goal.
— P. J. Abdul Kalam

You want something? Go get it with single-minded devotion.
— Reggie Lee

Success in any endeavor requires single-minded attention to detail and total concentration.
— Willie Sutton

Yes, singlemindedness is a real word, I know because Word didn’t underline it. LOL

It’s been a week, I tell you what. The weather was really crappy, which means my energy was low and my to-do list was high.

This year’s book flood anthology was a lot more work than I expected. I thought I’d do something a little different this year and use the freewriting I did a couple of years ago when a friend and I would get together once a week to write. So I dug the stories out, cleaned them up a bit, and thought I was done. And I would have been, except for the fact that I’d already used half of them in last year’s anthology.

*sigh*

I have a folder for my short fiction, and in it I have sub-folders for things like flash stories, sudden stories, micro stories, prompts, etc. and that’s about as far as the organization of them goes. So . . . I created a couple more sub folders, these ones for my book flood anthologies, and I moved all the stories I’ve used for them into the appropriate folder.

I don’t know why I didn’t do this before, it just kind of slipped my organizational mind. I think part of it was that I figured I might work on these stories some day and try to sell them or something, and I didn’t want them hidden away. But honestly, I can find them just as easily in the book flood folders.

Anyway, this meant I needed to find other prompt stories to flesh out my anthology. Which after much deliberation, I did. And it occurred to me, pretty much all my flash or less stories have been written from prompts. The longer stories come to me in the weird and wonderful way that novel ideas do, but the really short stuff I usually get from prompts.

Once I had my stories picked out I didn’t want to just throw them together willy nilly, so I made an attempt at grouping them together. Then I decided to get all fancy and adding title pages for each section. Kind of makes the anthology a little more cohesive.

And, of course, I had to format the whole thing. The font size had to be just right because when you print as a booklet, the pages shrink down. The space between lines took a bit of trial and error too. Single space (like this is) was too close together, but space and a half seemed too far apart. Eventually I found the “line spacing options” in Word, which gave me a just right option.

Because I numbered the pages, I ended up with three documents to print for each book – the section title pages, the index page and introduction, and the book itself. I didn’t want numbers on the other pages so it was easier to just print them out separately than to try and figure out how to suppress page numbers. The section pages were done in columns and could be printed normally, but the index and introduction were printed in booklet form, which is why it wasn't all printed as one document. I still haven’t figured out how to reduce the space at the top and bottom of the page, but it’s not enough to worry me too much.

Then I discovered, when doing a test print run, that the print menu attached to Word 2019 is very different from the one attached to Word 2007. Namely, it does not allow me to print in booklet form. Oh, I’m sure you can format your document for booklet in Word 2019, but it’s a lot easier to do it from the print menu.

It took longer than I had hoped for, but the anthology is done. And I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out.

Next year’s mission it to start on it earlier.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Wordage Report

NEW WORDS:
Blog Posts – 984+495+1,134=2,613
Total = 2,613 words

Hey, at least I got the blog posts done. I think I’m kinda done with the spice thing, so it’s just as well I remembered it’s December and I usually run Christmas videos during the holidays.

EDITING:
Other than some light editing on the stories included in the book flood anthology, I didn’t do any editing. This is a really busy time of year so what extra time I had was spent on the anthology.

WHAT I’M READING:
No reading, Christmas shopping and book flood anthology sucked up all my time.

GOALS
Well, I don’t know that I did better on my blog posts. I got them done, but not all of them up on time. I’ve given up on the spice thing in favor of Christmas videos. I may, or may not finish the spices in the new year. Or I might just move on to a series on herbs.

Elemental Spirit is still in the mothballs, but I’ll finish binding the anthologies today, so I’m sure to have time next week to get started on the editing.

Finally, a goal that’s been met! I got the book flood anthology done.

THIS WEEK’S GOALS
1. Do better on the blog posts.
2. Start the edits on An Elemental Spirit.
3. Start doing a freefall exercise every day.

Write on.