Hello, Dear Reader,

You've just arrived at my Now page, newly updated for 2024. Have a seat. Grab a cup of coffee, tea, or your favorite beverage. Make yourself comfortable while I share with you my current projects, goals, and aspirations.

So What's a Now Page?

Q1: Winter 2024

What's New in 2024?

1. Gleaning Words Updates

2024 marks the one year anniversary for my Substack newsletter Gleaning Words. I've been so excited to bare my journals for everyone to read and benefit from. The concept is simple: "Glean" the best entries from my many journals and convert them into posts for Substack.

It has been an amazing journey toward self-discovery, nostalgia, and overall self-improvement. The routine of writing two posts per week (initially, then one post per week) based on these entries was a great lesson for me in discipline and habit creation. Now, I have loads of entries to look back on as tangible evidence of my accomplishments.

This year, I've implemented a slight change for Gleaning Words that will help me focus on a different path of writing. Rather than posting once per week, I've switched to a bi-weekly newsletter. This will allow me more opportunities to both engage in the Substack community for the purpose of gaining new subscribers and populate my new writing venture with articles as well.

So what is my new writing venture?

2. Medium

Medium.com is the new destination for even more of my writing. Some articles from my blog will be repurposed there, but I will also be writing new content separate from both Gleaning Words and my blog.

The main reason I signed up for Medium is to generate revenue for my writing. The Medium Partner Program allows writers to earn money from their writing based on various factors such as read time, claps, highlights, comments/responses, and more. My main goal for my Medium profile in February has been to make at least $10 with my writing. The last time I checked, I'm over half-way there, and it's only been about three or four weeks.

Medium has been described as "YouTube for writers." In a nutshell, it works like this.

It sounds more difficult that it really is. My best advice if you want to get started on Medium, is to watch as many videos by the YouTuber Hudson Rennie as possible. I learned most everything I needed to know about Medium and growing on the platform from him.

3. Novel Edits

This November, fifteen years will have passed since I won my first NaNoWriMo contest, thereby writing my first complete novel. Over these long years, I've had an on-again-off-again relationship with my novel.

In 2015, I revisited my then-abandoned novel to begin edits before I had even completed the story. Then, in 2018, I finally completed the story and began revisions from the start. Last year I was determined to finally finish edits and publish my novel. Now, in 2024—six or seven drafts later—I'm about two-thirds of the way done.

Since focusing mainly on Substack in 2023, my editing again mostly went by the wayside; however, I have recently acquired a planning system created by a well-known indie author named Orna Ross, founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi for short). It's called the GoCreative Planning System, which began as a project on Kickstarter in late fall of last year.

Now that I have this tool in my arsenal, I can clearly see a path toward completing my edits. Although my main focus this year will be on accruing revenue via Medium and Substack, my goal is to complete my novel edits before the end of 2024.

Stay tuned to my Substack newsletter to be informed of updates about the novel's progress.

TTFN

Well, there you have it. My plans for the foreseeable future in 2024. Any future updates for this Now page will likely be solely in video format rather than all this typing—I'd rather save that for the aforementioned goals!