New Year's resolutions, Keegan style

(Sydney fireworks, 2008)

New Year's resolutions, you ask? Well ... maybe. They usually last through till February. This year I'm promising myself:

• write more, esp. some short stories
• read more (and I don't mean proofreading!)
• get out more
• do more bushwalking
• get my books to the Kindle store
• get them to Smashwords
• upload the digital novel (Legends)
• FINISH HELLGATE
• finish the damned haunted house novel

That might not sound like an impossible list, but you're looking at something like 800,000 words of fiction, which is a fairly large ask of a hack writer in twelve months! And I'm not a hack. Have no desire to be. So I guess I'll tackle it head-on and see how far I get. Some of those items can certainly be combined: getting out more, bushwalking, and reading more can all be rolled into one. And the Kindle and Smashwords objectives are more or less doable. The 800,000 words to process through...?!

We'll see. I've promised myself that HELLGATE will be complete by year's end, so that'll be the priority in the background, while the digital novel is going up chunk by chunk in the foreground. The item that'll probably wind up bumped to 2010 will be the haunted house story ... and I knooooow I promised it six months ago, but -- that particular muse took a detour and didn't come home. I'll send out the tracker dogs eventually.


New Year's Day is warm and feels humid ... I confess to feeling like a zombie after about three hours' sleep. Not that I did a hell of a lot of partying, but it was ... interesting. The moral of this story is, "Watch out for the Bailey's when you're feeling vulnerable. It's way too easy to drink and it's sneaky, very sneaky." As I recall, I once watched someone get snockered on Bailey's cheesecake.

The big news in the Mel-o-Sphere is that I'm installing a new and massive hard drive, hopefully tomorrow. This will be my first Terabyte drive. Also the first computer doohickey I've bought since I got the 22" widescreen monitor, so I don't feel too guilty about it -- esp. since I'm getting a killer deal. How does A$198 for a 1000GB external USB 2 plug-and-play drive sound? Too good to go by.

Many thanks for all the New Year messages I received from readers around the world -- much appreciated! I'm actually looking forward to 2009, perhaps because I have A Plan! As in, Keegan's Master Plan, if you recall: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/keegans-master-plan-for-2009.html. And also this: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/11/digital-publishing-gay-books-go-al.html -- Gay Books Go Al Fresco.

Google-wise, I'm still in the same situation: waiting for a resolution to the problem of having my page rankings zeroed out. It's stupefying to watch Aricia's Gay Book Blog (which is just a few weeks old) winning Google searches left and right, whereas I'm utterly stalled! Still --

I have to award kudos where they're deserved: AG has done a fantastic job. The blog looks so "mature," you'd swear it's been there for years, and in fact the first post went online on November 29th! Full marks, kid: the blog's already a lot of fun. (Don't thank me for the "plug" -- you earned it.)

The digital novel blog is actually online and functional, but I'm not going to give you the url just yet. A week or so. Be patient. Also, I'm thinking of doing two versions of the steamy scenes, in the interests of politeness. Upload the MA-15 scene, and include a link, "show me the vindaloo version." You'd click the link and pull up the version that'll fry the modem, if you want it -- or leave it alone if you prefer the milder curry with the banana-cream chaser.

The whole thing is experimental, and I'm looking forward to it a lot.

That's about it from me today. I think I have to take a nap. In fact, that's where I'm going right now.

All the best for 2009,
Cheers,
MK