We're going to revisit hockey just for a moment...

"Darn," you're thinking, right? Y'all finally got a break from my hockey obsession and here we are again.

I just want to express my disappointment in the San Jose Sharks--who I'm sure are way more disappointed in themselves than I truly am--but I digress.

The Sharks were supposed to win the third round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and send the St. Louis Blues home laden with disappointment. The Blues, you remember, won over my Dallas Stars in the second round of said playoffs and sent my boys home laden with that disappointment.

Instead, the Blues are moving on to the Stanley Cup Finals, playing the Boston Bruins. I hate the Bruins and I hate the Blues this year, so I don't know who'd I'd prefer to win. Not that it matters since it's not the Stars, the Golden Knights, or the Penguins.

 Now back to whatever I was originally going to ramble on about... Um... No, seriously, blog topics are a crap shoot. Did I think of something and forget because I didn't make a note somewhere? Did something happen in the world that I have an opinion on? Is there anything exciting going on in my life that rates coverage? No, no, and no.

Let me roll the metaphorical dice and see what occurs to me...

Okay, so...

I used to think life was busy with kids and that once they'd all grown up and moved away, life would be less busy, but that's not the case. It's not a bad thing, but anyone who has reached a certain age (it's different for everyone, I think) knows that time starts to pass faster. I do think you have to be at least 50 years old, though, yeah?

One of our speakers at writers group this past weekend talked about business plans. Now, several years ago, I put one together. It wasn't nearly as detailed as this person's but it served its purpose at the time.

Something she said struck a chord and is something I'd heard or considered before, but didn't really put into practice. Fast forward to two and a half months ago when an opportunity to participate in an anthology was passed along to me. I wanted to do it, but with all the hockey going on, could I pull it off?

I had to consider the deadlines, the scope of the project, if I could even come up with characters and a plot line, and how many days I'd be out of commission to write in the early morning because of a late night of hockey. I spent a weekend on characters and plot before I joined. If I didn't have that, there was no point. Then I figured up how many days were available to me and how many of them would be writing days. After that, I calculated how many words a day I had to write.

One of the woman's points when drawing up the business plan was how many books a year do you plan to write and or publish. You've obviously got to factor in your real life (day job, children, travel, etc) as well as how fast a writer are you.

It was a concept I'd considered previously but didn't do much with it, but I probably won't have the two books I wanted to publish out in the world this year. I will have the anthology I just mentioned and possibly another little volume of very short "coffee reads"--they're short enough to read while consuming a single cup of coffee--but not the two longer books I have despite both of them being half written.

The fact that they're both half-written and I can't seem to get them done maybe speaks to other issues. I'm trying to sort those...

Anyway. I need to try the approach of deciding on how many books to publish, how long they're going to be, plot and plan them, set deadlines maybe, sort daily word counts, and then--as Nike says--JUST DO IT.

Yeah, some of that ain't so easy. The plotting gets me every time.

Anyway, back to work. Have a great rest of your week.