A look back on my projects list

I recently decided to do a post on what ebooks I hope to self-publish sometime in the next year.  That post should be up later today.  But after I started it, I realized that I had done a previous post like that.  In December 2015 I posted The projects I’m working on, and the following March I added some Additional projects.  Before doing my new list, I should see how I did with my last.

Altogether, I wanted to publish the short stories “Relics” and “Rediscovery,” and the collection of essays “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars.” There were also the short story collections: “The Uncapped Pen,” “Amongst Us and other stories,” two scifi story collections, and three general story collections.  There were also other projects like, “140 Twitter Length Stories,” “Stephen L. Thompson / A collection of haiku / Two hundred total,” and “Possible Futures,” which was a mixture of essays, short stories, and random thoughts.

And what have I accomplished?  I’ve self-published “Relics,” and “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars.” I’ve also started posting “Possible Futures” blogs on my other blog.  Maybe someday I’ll collect them into an ebook.

So out of thirteen projects I did two and-a-half-ish.  It’s probably a good thing that my new goal list has only three projects on it then.

And what of the other ten projects?  I have a very, very rough first draft of “Rediscovery.” It needs a lot of work, and also there are a couple of stories I need to write to fit into “Rediscovery.” I’m not sure when I’ll get around to that.  I’ve probably been working on, but mostly off, “The Uncapped Pen” for six or seven years now.  I think it will be at the top of whatever list I make in 2018.  “Amongst Us and other stories” has also been floating around for a few years, and it will probably also be on my 2018 list.  “140 Twitter Length Stories” and “Stephen L. Thompson / A collection of haiku / Two hundred total” are projects I can do anytime, assuming I can get around to writing enough short, short stories and haiku to fill them out.

As for the short story collections, two of them have been combined into my “Seventh Story Stockpile,” which I’ll discuss more in the next post.  I’ll also talk about “Travels Beyond Imagination,” which is the title for one of the projects that was untitled.  As to the other two story collections, I’ll slowly plug along on them.  Maybe they’ll make my 2019 list.

On one hand it’s good to make such lists, but on the other it probably helps to put it someplace so you can refer back to it and hopefully keep your goals.  Which is why I’m going to post a link to my new list on my website.  That way I shouldn’t forget about the plans I make and will keep plugging away at them.  We’ll have to see how that works.