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Home Stretch
Winter. Spring. Winter. Spring. Winter. Spring. The seasons change on an almost daily basis, but we’re approaching the tipping point at which Spring will eventually prevail.
Homework
If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. ~W. Edwards Deming
Okay, as you may or may not know, I have been endeavoring for quite some time to be able to generate an adequate income without leaving the comfort of my cozy little home.
Be that as it may, the actual process has eluded me thus far. I have a variety of web properties, but none of these virtual engines are turning over for me.
Why?
Because there’s always one unstated step that the teachers, coaches and gurus take so totally for granted that they don’t realize that they even have to say it. Actually, “it” is usually a variety of things which ought to be stated explicitly but aren’t.
In most cases, it’s because they really don’t have a goddamned plan.
In many cases, these jokers luck upon something that works for a certain period of time. Then they create a product that teaches that thing just in time for it not to work anymore. It’s the bane of the “Make Money Online” world.
People either come up with little hacks that wind up being identified and punished right about the time they’re teaching it to everyone else.
In many cases, people get these tips second or third hand and you get the Whisper Down The Lane Effect. The original message goes through a variety of perception filters and the result is a confused hodge-podge of whatever the idea was in the first place.
Well, this is do-or-die time.
I literally have no other option than to get this working at long last. I will be proceeding methodically and documenting what works and excoriating what does not.
Stay tuned for the results. 2019 is going to be an interesting year for more reasons than politics and superhero movies.
Healthy Stretching
I mentioned earlier that I was going to be using yoga as a path to recovery.
The ankle I sprained last July is essentially serviceable. I get the occasional twinge, but that’s mostly because I’m old and overweight.
The ribs I broke last September are apparently back in some semblance of their original state. The latest x-ray shows no breaks or fractures. Be that as it may, I still have a threshold of tolerance that is well short of an honest day’s work. Needless to say, this is an enormous problem for me.
I do have my novels in development, but even a best-case scenario for their publication does not provide me a living income. That’s more of a passion project than it is a potentially dependable stream of revenue.
Stretch Of The Imagination
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Of course, being boundless, you can write whatever you want. That being said, it’s the boundaries that you decide on that shape the world you’re writing about.
Whether you’re doing something as completely far out as Franz Kafka’s work or something as gritty and realistic as an Ed McBain police procedural, you’re still ultimately answering the question “What If?“.
Decisions as mundane as whether there are four bank robbers or five or as exotic as whether magic exists or not shape the possible outcomes of your story.
As soon as you start asking “What If?“, you open up a universe of possibilities.
For me, I’ve been working on a collection of stories set in a world where superheroes exist in small but growing numbers. For the vast majority of the people in my fictional world, the day to day reality is quite like our own. You might not guess that since the stories focus on the very few people who do have powers, but the big “What If?” about the Sentinels‘ world centers around what impact a few people with powers would have on a world like ours.
A few more tax tasks to tackle and then back to work on my various sites. I hope you’re finding your passion and acting on it this weekend.