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Well, as you may
have noticed, 2018 isn’t getting a good start here at the Far Out
Fantastic Site since I missed posting last week. So I apologise for
that. It was a busy weekend, and some of us celebrate the holidays as
long as six days into the new year and since this isn’t a religious
blog I won’t go into details with the exception of a few clues:
Magic, Magi and Three Kings. Put them together or do a Google search
on all three, which is, by the way, a number that has traditionally
been believed by many societies to be magic.
Last blog post we
looked back at the previous year of 2017. This post
let’s look into the very near future of 2018 of a not very
well-known author’s life. To be specific, let’s look at this
author’s planned resolutions of the new year.
My Very Near, Planned Future of 2018
1. Do more live
events to promote my books. As I said last post, one of my greatest
accomplishments of 2017 was doing my first live event to promote my
books. Because that was so successful, I’m going to
try promoting at more conventions.
2. Submit a short
story to at least three (that magic number again!) publications. For
the last five years or so I have been focusing on self-publishing
more than anything and so had only been considering publications for
submission. But in order to broaden your chances of making your work
known to a wider audience, an author should take as many routes
possible. So I’m going to give an ample amount of time throughout
the year to research the markets and submit to at least three of
them.
3. (Aaaand that magic
number again!) Resume the publishing process of my second short
fiction collection. It’s been nearly two years since I’ve worked
on my second book of short fiction, that I had entitled The
Hidden. When I last spoke of it , I said I would take a “slight hiatus”, though it’s been a
little longer than slight. I had also said that I would publish some
of the stories for that collection individually and so each as its
own book. I only did that with one so far, which was “Circa SixtyYears Dead” Because I’ve seen how well publishing a
single short work as such works, I’m planning to return to
self-publishing the second collection. So, how well did publishing
the above mentioned single short story work? Well enough to move on
to publishing it in the upcoming collection.
4. Write another
novella. As I also said last time, writing a full draft of a novella
was a great accomplishment for 2017 because it was the first time I
completed a draft in that format. So this year’s goal will be to
write a second novella in full first draft format and begin the
revision process.
5. Give A Far Out
Fantastic Site a new look. It’s been more than two years since I
changed the appearance of the blog, so it’s due for new appearance.
You’re probably sick of seeing an image of several heads floating
in a vortex. An image that’s repeated across the screen 10-plus
times!
6. Advocate more
overtly for Freehand Illustration. You may have noticed by now, if
you’ve been reading my blog for at least the last year, that I’ve
discussed a lot of the benefits of freehand book illustration,
especially for covers, in this age of computer art (a.k.a. digital
art). I think 2018 will be the year that I start carrying out more
strategy to promote other freehand illustrators’ work so the world
will see the aesthetic value in art made by the active technicques of
human beings rather than the methods of machines.
Everybody's Very Near Future of 2018?
Well, that’s
looking at my future life of 2018. Now whether it’s to be fulfilled
or not is a different story. But now what about the future of all of
us for 2018? Well, I was reading an interesting article concerning
that. Anticipation of 2018 was actually attempted by intellects in
1968. And, as the article discusses, while much of that anticipation
missed the mark, some of it came pretty close. Give it a read. You
may be surprised. It’s in the online version (and probably the hard
copy one as well) of The New Yorker and is called “The 1968 Book That Tried to Predict the World of 2018”.
Along similar lines,
a documentary, made not too long after the book that the above
mentioned article discusses, is the 1972 documentary Future Shock.
And even though the predictions of this documentary, which was based
on the 1970 book of the same name, are not precise they also come
eerily close. It’s really well-made, partly because it’s narrated
by the great Orson Welles. So I suggest you check it out as well,
which you can do for free on YouTube.
So what are your
plans, predictions and/or resolutions for the immediate future of
2018?
Until next time . .
.
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