I have returned

November was a thing. People I don't know slept in my house, I ran a race, I got sick, I went to concerts, I got sick again, I ate more Thanksgiving dinners than a family of four, I drank a few bottles of whiskey which made me get sick a third time, and saw some friends I haven't seen since college. Along the way, I came up with a plan that will see me with six published titles by this time next year.

Here's the deal. I'm THIS many chapters from finishing the draft of The Nomad Wilds. If I continue kicking my word counts in the face, it'll be done by the end of the month. The first novel I wrote needs a new title, new plot, and a good once-over, but I can make edits on that in a couple of months once Nomads is done. That comes out in March. Six short stories need the same treatment and will take a week each and another week to organize them into a couple of collections. That puts me at the beginning of April. Start the edits on Nomads then, and I'll be working on the new non-fiction book I have in mind throughout. Assuming I am not delayed, both of those get out next fall. Six titles in time for the next Christmas spender bender.

As far as the present is concerned, I'm a little more confused. Battlesongs of Hope is still selling, even though I've been acting like it doesn't exist for more than a month. No forums, no promotion of any kind, and it's still plugging along. Hell, I haven't so much as updated Facebook more than twice in the last five weeks, and in November I had twice as many pageviews as I did in my previous best month. I don't know who you people are or where you come from, but I hope you stick around. Welcome.

But on to the important things. I mentioned a non-fiction book. Well. I has an idea. And since I think in words I'm going to be working through it here before it goes into book form. It goes back to conversations with Girlfriend and working through her myriad bits of individuality.

My current embryonic belief is that that the tendency towards positive or negative decisions is primarily a function of a person's relations to input and their perceptions of output. In turn, a person's inputs and outputs are affected by a number of paired relationships. I currently call the sum of these paired relationships the dimensions of discipline because they create a matrix in which a person can be highly disciplined in some areas and highly undisciplined in others. And the real kicker, the thing that got me to start this exploration, is that in a single given person, two IDENTICAL inputs in IDENTICAL circumstances can produce two entirely DIFFERENT yet equally logical outputs. Yet there is a pattern and predictability to those outputs, and I intend to discover it.

The factors at play are these:
• Long term vs short term
• Self love vs self destruction
• Peace vs progress
• Resting vs working

There may be more, but those are the ones that I'm working with now. I'll have more in subsequent posts; for now I have to do my squats because I have not lifted in several weeks and am visibly withering.

Onward...