Master List of Progress Reports - 2003

2003: Year In Review

I don't even want to write this sentence, but here goes: I posted half a chapter in 2003.

Damn, that looks horrible.

In my defense, I had asked my then girlfriend (now wife) to marry me, so most of my focus was on planning our handfasting. We didn't go the traditional route and instead planned the entire thing ourselves, including writing our own ceremony, so it was a lot of work.

There were also several life crises, including my wife's mother needing bypass surgery (started out double, then quadruple, and ended up triple because the fourth artery was thinner than a pencil line, which was far too small to hold stitches), but as a Jehovah's Witness, she wouldn't accept blood, so her insurance threw a fit and it took several months to find anyone willing to perform the surgery (ended up having to go out of state).

But mostly I was in revision hell or working on unposted stories, so even when I got a chapter completed, I couldn't post it. I'd made a promise, both to myself and my readers, not to post any new unfinished stories, and the same was true for the revisions, since I wasn't about to take down later posted chapters just so they wouldn't conflict with my revisions on the earlier chapters.

I actually completed revisions for 18 chapters of The Vampire Hunter, which worked out to about 30 pages of new and expanded scenes (at the time, anyway; I've since gone back over the story and revised the revisions, but more on that later). So even though a lot was going on, I was still making progress. It just wasn't visible progress.

Moral of the Story

What you see isn't always the whole story. Or maybe what you can remember isn't always the way it happened.

In going back over these first few years of my online writing career, I've realized I've been putting myself down a lot for not writing as much as I had in the beginning, but in my head, that decline in postings happened all at once in the first year or so. Now I can see that I kept up a steady stream of new chapters for several years, despite all the craziness of those years. I know it still doesn't make up for the later years of not posting at all, but it's not as bad as I've been making it out to be in my head.

I think I just started believing all the hype I got from a lot of readers, especially after posting a chapter and instead of receiving thank you's or constructive feedback, I would get a flood of inquiries about when I was going to update some other story or when would the next chapter be available after the current one I'd just posted. Those kinds of responses made me feel like I hadn't accomplished anything and I bought into that and have carried it with me all this time.

Figuring this stuff out makes me glad I took the time to do this little year-in-review project as part of updating the Progress Reports pages to be more useful. Maybe now I can stop getting so down on myself about the past and just focus on the present.