I made a goal to write 10 new Myke Phoenix stories in 2014, for a total of 12 in the latest series. That’s one a month through October. My sub-goal was to have the next month’s story finished when I released this month’s. That means The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur was supposed to be finished by March 3, when I released Duck Man Walking.
I should have May’s story almost finished by now, but less than two weeks before the release date of April 7, I’m halfway through the dinosaur story. This is the exciting part.
Anyone who’s followed my creative journey – I think there are four or five of you – knows that I am pretty good at setting goals and getting started. The problem comes with the arrival of what Seth Godin calls The Dip and Steven Pressfield calls The Resistance. This is when, if I don’t watch out (and I usually don’t), the quotidian of daily life interferes and the project gets set aside. My office and the Internet are filled with partially finished Bluhm projects.
It would be easy to shift the deadline – sure, I could finish this story by May and just move everything back, because at this stage almost no one is paying attention – but that’s a slippery slope. Nope, I have to have this story done by April 7, and the May story not long after that, so that by June I’m a month ahead again.
Why? Why press forward to meet a deadline that only I, of 6 billion people on the planet, care about?
Because the alternative is to let inertia take over, to yield to the Resistance. And I prefer to keep pressing forward.
So: Ready or not, something called The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur will be released to the ether on April 7. I’m terrified. And excited.
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