"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."

This is the first thing that came up
when I search for "celebration." I...
I don't know.

Holy shit, I'm just two sales away from 700 at Common Brimstone. I was only just figuring out how to celebrate reaching 600 sales in April o_O I'm not going to make a big deal of it every time I hit a certain number, but I still can't quite get my head around the fact that, "hey, you started a business and it's working!" It makes me extremely proud and giddy to be doing something creative that I love, sharing it with other people and finding out they love it too. And I really want to apply the attitude and techniques that I used to get Common Brimstone to this point to my writing career.

Saturday night, Kyle and I did a lot of deep, meaningful talking and I just ranted and raved to him about my writing and he ranted and raved back about how talented I am and how much he loves my stuff, even the stuff he wouldn't normally read. I know a lot of it was probably just warm-fuzzies, but it did make me feel like I can't keep underestimating myself as a writer and that I should stop telling myself my writing career is going nowhere. If I can accidentally build a really successful home business, I should really be able to deliberately channel more energy into my writing and make something out of it, instead of just resigning myself to "never going to achieve much there." And I should remember that I've already achieved a lot. If someone asks me about my perfume, I will jabber at them for hours. Why don't I have that same sense of pride and accomplishment about my writing? I should. I'm an award-winning bestseller, dammit. I need to take back ownership of my writing.
 
And I need to carve out time to do that. Last year when I was working on Ethan #3 I'd get up half an hour earlier so I could be at work an hour early and write in that time. I worked slavishly on Ethan #3. Every morning, every lunch break, every free second I had, and some seconds that weren't actually free. And it was a terrible, terrible book. That's why I eventually scrapped it. But hey, look, Undertow is going to be out in the wild this year and if there's one thing I know I love, it's Ethan Banning, and being mean to Ethan Banning, and making Ethan Banning's life miserable. You know, for Art. Frankly, if anything is going to spark the same energy in me that my perfume-making does, it's going to be giving Ethan a really hard time.

At the moment I'm working on a short paranormal romance piece inspired by my love of cryptozoology. I'm about halfway through and my aim is to have it finished this week and submit it before the end of May. Then. Then. Oh then. Then I am going really mess up Ethan's life moreso. I christened 2014 the Year of the Kraken, as in, "let's just grab stuff and wreck it and damn the consequences." I think it's high time I applied that philosophy to my writing life.

Me, grabbing stuff and wrecking it: an approximation.