Life is all about tradeoffs. Of course, the ultimate tradeoff is time. Everything you do has a cost in time. It is the only resource you have that can’t be recovered. You can make more money, have more friends, experience more emotions, but you don’t get more time. There’s an old Spanish saying – “make your choice and pay the price”. Time is always the price in that equation. There may be additional costs but always time.
Over the last few days I’ve made progress on the programming front. I’ve been learning about model view controller frameworks using PHP, as previously mentioned. I think I’ve gotten to the point where I understand it enough that I can start working on some other programming projects I’ve had in mind for a while. This is a Good Thing(tm).
I think this has been time well spent. Some of these projects have the potential to generate some income. Income is also a Good Thing(tm).
The downside is that I’ve gotten nothing done on the writing front. The first quarterly blog hop is coming up in two weeks. I’ve at least decided on the genre for this year’s blog hop flash fiction stories (space opera). Now I need to work on getting some story ideas. I trust the Muse as she usually comes up with something, even when I procrastinate and put things off to the last minute. It probably drives her nuts, and it isn’t a process I should rely on. I really don’t want to piss off the Muse and have her stop giving me stories to tell.
Also, February seems to be the (un)official flash fiction month as I’ve seen several online challenges for writing flash fiction stories. They are all of the ‘write a flash fiction every day in February’ variety. I’ve done that but I seem to do it in July. Probably because Dean Wesley Smith usually does his own personal challenge to write a story (not necessarily flash fiction) every day in July. He posts on his blog when he does his challenges to keep himself accountable.
Writing fiction is fun, and it too has the potential to generate income, but realistically, it isn’t likely to generate as much income as my programming projects. I hope that enough people like my stories enough to be able to support myself through my writing, but it will take time to build an audience. The software projects will take some time to build a audience as well, but I think there is a wider audience for them than my writing.
I don’t really need a large audience for either to make money. The best I can do is to work on both programming and writing, launch both into the wild, and see what happens. If one or both catch on and take off in a big way, so much the better.
I guess I just need to work on balancing my time between the two so neither of them suffer needlessly.
I hope all your plans are working out, my Hordeling.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum