The Red Notebook

Sometime in 2014, my wife gave me a red notebook –  a souvenir from her trip to Google’s headquarters in Ireland. On the first page, I wrote a plan to kickstart my fiction writing. I broke it down by year – finish a novel by the end of 2015. Finish another novel and self-publish a game in 2016.

And by 2018, I’d sell an original novel to a publisher.

About half the items on that page have big red ‘X’s next to them now. Life gets in the way, projects get abandoned,  priorities change. The plan’s a direction, not a map.

But there’s still time for a nice green checkmark on that 2018 goal – among other things. That red notebook has dozens of other ideas for stories locked away in it, and some of them may still get to hatch.