What are some ways I can seek out feedback and constructive criticism to continue growing and improving?
At least when it comes to writing, I’ve done a few things to try and get feedback.
One is this very blog! I know I don’t exactly solicit people to leave comments for feedback and constructive criticism, but I haven’t discouraged it much either.
Another that I’ve done earlier this year was a writing contest that promised two avenues for feedback: peer feedback and judges. The peer feedback was done through a private message board where we could all read each others stories and then respond in their respective threads, while the judges were tasked with providing objective feedback on how our stories were written and the things that we should look at it for future attempts.
Something that I’ve dipped my toe into so far is joining Discord servers that are focused on writing. I haven’t started socializing in them as of yet, but I have access to them so I can start building connections and such. I’ve also started to do some reading/writing group activities for others who are writing so that I can get some experience under my belt as part of a sort “book club” as an alpha reader.
Those are all the things that come to mind at this time that I’ve been doing in this regard, and you can apply similar tactics in other areas of your life depending on what it is you’re seeking feedback on.
Now, for myself, I just need to put more effort into the “social” aspect of a lot of it.
Are you actively trying to learn to use AI to complement your work? Or are you trying to learn more unique skills that cannot be easily replicated by AI?
The regular daily prompt was something about a big risk that I haven’t taken yet, but since I answered that one a while back, I decided to fill in with my own. It did pop up in the back of my mind again, though, when I stumbled upon the one I added above while scouting for a new idea.
First, I’d like to mention that I have already dabbled with AI a bit for different reasons, but I haven’t made the leap to trying to use it for my own benefit. I’ve learned a smidge about how they work, and how they’re being used in different industries, but shelved the idea of leaning on them when what I saw was giving me an icky feeling (at the time).
One of the things I did was mess around with ChatGPT a little to try and see what kinds of information it had access to from Dungeons and Dragons so that I could try to possibly use it as a little Assistant DM (should I ever actually get a group together and play). This was early on in my research for trying to understand the hype, learning a bit about Large Language Models, and I kind of liked how things were turning out. It could pull up all kinds of information on short notice and offer explanations (to the best of its ability) on how certain things worked or where the information was sourced so that I might look into it myself to confirm.
After tinkering with it for a bit I got the idea to see what kinds of ideas it could string together to help me from a creative writing aspect. Then I got cold feet. I put that idea aside for a bit, and went on my way. Not long thereafter was when I stumbled upon an issue that was springing up in the indie-publishing world for fiction authors. Apparently, the market, especially on Kindle, had been getting flooded with stories. What tipped me off were comments and posts on different social media sites and on reddit that all mentioned how they felt similar, and were poorly constructed and almost rushed. People started putting two and two together, and realized that it had to be AI-related. This gave me some serious pause. Several months went by and I saw someone comment about how people were being caught and screened for trying to submit AI built manuscripts to traditional publishers, which caused these reviewers and some editors to start including phrasing concerning these kinds of manuscripts. So, while I didn’t get my hopes up to begin with, it did severely stifle the idea of using AI for creative writing purposes.
At least, until someone pointed out (it was probably Brandon Sanderson, since I listen to a lot of his podcasts and such) that it’s still up to the writer (me) to actually sift through the AI responses and craft things. I don’t HAVE to use exactly what is generated. Which just took me back to my original idea for the D&D stuff. I can use it for ideas, maybe throw in a more developed prompt to see what gets churned out, and then further customize everything (or even throw things out entirely!) So, I may circle back around to trialing it at a later date if I feel like I’m getting stuck. For now, though, I’m still running on my own brain.
One other area I dabbled with AI, actually very recently, was with coding/scripting for work. I didn’t actually use my work device or any sort of sensitive data, so as to avoid risks, but I was stuck trying to figure out a way to make something work in Microsoft Power BI for some reporting I work on. I wanted to try converting DAX scripting into M code to see if it might help improve processing data from a massively customized date table I had constructed. So, I plugged in the idea to a different AI service via my phone, and tried to work with what was given back. Sadly, I couldn’t make it do what I wanted, so it was a bust. I’ve not looked toward AI for work purposes since then, and doubtful I will again since I really should be developing that knowledge and skill set on my own and not relying on AI to do it for me (or else why bother having me do the work at all?)
At this point, all things considered, I still haven’t messed with AI as much as some people, and I don’t know how soon I’ll get back to dabbling with it for creative writing purposes or as a sort of Assistant DM, but I know I’m definitely not intending to use it for work again any time soon.
What goals did you set for yourself this year? What goals do you have for the next few years and beyond?
Today’s prompt is another amalgamation I created from ones I saw on Sage and Bloom from their post on personal growth and self-improvement.
After I read a couple of similar prompts around goals, I did a little introspection and looking back over the year to see what I’ve accomplished versus what I had planned for. A couple of my goals I won’t reveal specifics but I will give an idea of progress.
Starting a year ago, on about October 15th, I had put up a couple of goals for myself with a target completion date of my 36th birthday in late March. One goal was focused on physical fitness (and I failed spectacularly) while the other was on writing. On the physical fitness side, I was planning to do one of two things at least 4 times a week: go to the gym to work out, or do body weight/resistance bands at home. I think the total count targeted was supposed to be around 120 and I made it maybe a quarter of the time. The writing goal was a little more straightforward. Write every day and hit something like 160 posts for the blog. (If you’ve been following along for the last year, you know that I absolutely CRUSHED that goal!)
Tracking those two goals was easy. I have a small whiteboard in my room where I marked out a grid space for the calendar month and a space above it for reminders and tracking totals. In the grid space I would use a red mark to indicate the fitness activity for the day (just a simple check mark to say I did it) and green for the writing. Then, at the end of each month (or beginning of the new month if I forgot to do it before bed) I would tally up the marks and add them to the running total in the reminder space above. Easy stuff! It felt good to add the marks, but the writing goal was so much easier to manage because I was literally able to do that anywhere at any time because I was using my cellphone and posting from work during breaks or downtime between meetings.
Anyways, those two goals were meant to be short term ones that would help me build a habit and routine. The writing one has worked out great! I went from aiming for less than six months to just keeping up that momentum for over a year now. (I’ll have to go back to the drawing board and do some reflecting on that fitness goal.)
I did have a couple of other writing goals that I put together earlier in the year, and even made a checklist on my phone as a reminder of some “six month strategy” goals but I haven’t made as much progress on them as I would like. One was just a reminder of doing my daily writing prompts, the other two were other writing projects which, although I HAVE worked on, I’m still just in planning and world building. Technically speaking, I still have time in my “six months” but not a lot at this point. Those will likely roll over into the new year.
So, current goals from the past year? Daily writing: crushed. Fitness, writing projects: needs a lot of work.
Goals for the future? Well, I’ve mentioned before in various ways that I struggle with setting goals and sticking with them when they’re focused on myself and I’m only accountable to myself. So, while I might have goals I’d LIKE to achieve in the next 2-5 or 5-10 years, actually getting them across the finish line is a different story. A simple list of those goals is getting some novels written and published, owning my own home, being debt free (outside of the house, most likely) and being self-sustained financially on my writing. Will all that happen? Well, only time will tell.
Looking back at the year so far (we still have about two and a half months to go) I’d say I stand a fair chance at actually accomplishing what I want. I just need to make some changes.
Since it seems like today’s daily writing prompt is another repeat, I’ll go into something else I was thinking about recently.
Today should be, I believe, the 362nd day in a row that I’ll have posted something to the blog. Given that I’m closing in on a 1-year streak, I decided to look into some stats. How many words have I written? How many posts? How does it compare to writing a full length novel in the same time frame?
Well, WordPress collects some of these things, but not in the way that I needed. So I decided to do some extra leg work today and check the word counts of all of my posts since October 16th, 2023 when I first started down this path of trying to write every single day. I’ll also be incorporating some numbers for last November’s NaNoWriMo, as proof of effort.
According to my calculations (I used Excel to help track all of this):
371 individual posts written
111,245 words just for the blog
151,143 words when including NaNoWriMo 2023
299.85 average words per post
2,925 words in the longest post (although admittedly that was copying what I wrote for a writing contest)
1,230 words in the longest post that DIDN’T include the writing contest results
That’s all I think I’m going to share, which is basically everything I was concerned with at this time (although, I totally did consider making some graphs.)
The key takeaway I want to point out, for myself as well as others who might be thinking of writing a full length novel (or two or three) is that even if you can only get down 300 words per day during some spare time, if you write every single day then you can definitely make it in a year and have the potential wiggle room for editing to bring total word count down to a reasonable level. Aim for that 100,000 word mark at just a few hundred words per day and you’re golden.
It’s really quite simple. Anything that I do that allows me to immerse myself into it and forget the things that have been stressing me out are things that help me relax.
Video games, reading/writing, painting miniatures while listening to music or podcasts (lately it has been Legends of Avantris and their Once Upon A Witchlight campaign on YouTube) and of course sleeping.
Each of these activities takes my focus away from the stressors of life and gives me a good distraction so that I can relax, often in an almost pseudo-meditative state of mind.
There really aren’t enough hours in the day. So, let’s change that!
My ideal day would be like 36 hours long, at least. I know the Earth’s rotation won’t allow that and our bodies aren’t accustomed to it, but that’s okay. This is all purely hypothetical.
So, 36 hours. How do I fill that to make MY ideal day? I’d start by sleeping in and getting about 12 hours of sleep. I love sleep so much, but I have to respect the order of the world we live in by having a job and paying bills.
After I wake up I would probably eat a small breakfast on the patio while I watch the sunrise, about an hour at most spent here. (I don’t currently HAVE a patio that faces East, but if we’re making the day 36 hours long then I can live anywhere I want.)
After breakfast would be some game time. Not sure what I would play, but I would probably spend 4 hours on that? Maybe 6? Followed by lunch, and then back to gaming for another 4-6 hours. Let’s say that puts us at 25 hours. 11 hours to go!
The last 11-13 hours would be running around doing chores around the house or running errands, followed by dinner, and then ending with a couple more hours of game time.
Super simple and fairly straightforward. Although, the most important part of all of this is just that I would have 36 hours in the day. I could totally spend half a day hiking, have a light lunch at the top of the mountain, and then the rest be roughly the same. If I still worked 8 hours in the day I would have a ton of time to fit in all the things I would want to do.
Wait, I forgot to include writing! I would definitely cut out one of the time slots for gaming and swap in writing for 4-6 hours. This still assumes that I have a regular job, though. If writing was my full time job then it would just replace that for 8 hours.
Either way, my body would hate me for being up for 24 hours.
So many books to read, so little time! I have a decent list of books to read that I’ve picked up in the last couple of years, and I actually put that list into a personal OneNote so I could track purchases. Below is the list of most recent books that I’ve purchased and added to my backlog. There are 33 books in the list, and I’ve grouped some based on series. Are any of them on your list?
Mistborn Era 1
The Final Empire (Read)
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages
Mistborn Era 2
The Alloy of Law
Shadows of Self
The Bands of Mourning
The Lost Metal
Elantris
Warbreaker
The Stormlight Archive
The Way of Kings
Words of Radiance
Oathbringer
Rhythm of War
Wind and Truth
Brandon Sanderson Secret Projects
Tress of the Emerald Sea
The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England
Yumi and the Nightmare Painter
The Sunlit Man
J.W. Wells & Co.
The Portable Door
In Your Dreams
Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard
You Don’t Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps
The Dragon's Grove 