Well it's been about a month since I've come to Japan. The first two weeks were so intensely busy with training for my new job that there was absolutely no time to write / edit / etc! Not even on the short story I'm working on! Meh! Then two weeks ago I moved into my apartment and things have slowed down considerably, much to my blissful satisfaction. Work still eats up a lot of my time, but my downtime is mine again and that means I've been able to get back to ~real work~ in the evenings. Editing on CROSS//Rebirth is coming along, but due to a brain-meltdown on where to put some info, I have not been able to put up any of the new revised chapters yet.
However, that's not the entire purpose of this entry (aside from letting you all know that I am -still- alive!) I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with my ~future~, as it were. It's been a rough two or three years, so I've lost a lot of focus on long-term goals and what I would generally like to accomplish before I die. That said, one of the things I've been thinking about is what I want to do with my life when I move back home to America. (As it is, I mostly came to work in Japan to make some much-needed money thanks to the great economy back in Oregon.) Currently I have no great career goals (outside of writing, of course), a desire to go back to school, a place I just have to live in, or anything like that, so it's hard for me to think of what I have to look forward to - basically, I'm not really saving my money for anything other than to have something to live off while I look for a job back in America. That's not very fun. Then it dawned on me while I was editing the other night...why don't I publish when I get back? I've been talking about it for a long time, but real life stuff has always gotten in the way of me being able to actually finish my projects. The reason why I need to save my money for this is because I've had it on my mind for quite a while now to self-publish, at least in the beginning.
If nothing else, it gives me some purpose to working other than "make money". It makes working a little more bearable when you know you have this ultimate goal, doesn't it? Publishing would also be very good for me mentally as well: it would be nice to know that all my hard work has finally paid off!
This is all still at least over a year away before I start moving on it, and hopefully by then I hope to have CROSS///Rebirth edited to death. Yes, that's right. For the longest time I've had my heart set on publishing Nagnomei first, but it's not ready, and CROSS// more or less is (editing aside). Until that time, however, I still have to finish editing it to death, having it proofread by others, finalizing cover designs (any bored graphic artists out there?) and researching publishers. If anybody has any experience in self-publishing and can recommend (to use or avoid) who they went with, that would help greatly!
Meanwhile, I'll be over here with my fingers to the keyboard, as always. I'm currently polishing a short story that I've recently written so expect to see that up soon! (Hopefully sooner than later ^^;).
