💌Hanlon’s Reader #1: August Newsletter

"If you ain't first, you're last." 🏁 🏎💨

Aug 30, 2023

^📅Monthly Update: August 2023

Hi everyone!

It’s the final Wednesday of the month, and this is the first official Author’s Newsletter from the new fiction publication “Hanlon’s Reader.” My name is James Hanlon and I’m the author of this project. So far I’ve only got one book under my belt, but that’s what this Substack aims to change.

For now, I’m going to try and stick to a consistent format for the Newsletter based on the inescapable concept of… ⏳ T I M E ⏳

📅 Monthly Update
- Since the Newsletter goes out at the end of each month, first I’ll provide updates on what I’ve been working on and sort of summarize how the month went from a writing perspective
🔃 In Progress
- Whatever I’m currently building toward, I’ll talk about that and plans for now
❗❗ Upcoming
- Long-term updates—where I see things going beyond the next couple of weeks and my immediate goals
🎁 Bonus Content
- What mysterious treats may lie ahead? Only curiosity will reward you.

Basically, this month has been 🛠setting 💪up 🏪shop. Still generating new content, but mostly I’m learning about Substack and spending a little too much time making robot graphics in Canva. 🤖

I hope you like them 💚

🔃 In Progress:

Strange Harvest wasn’t finished. It was never finished. At the time I stopped writing, the story just ended after the ninth part. I won’t spoil anything since Part VI: Lotus & Part VII: Hive are going to be released tomorrow Thurs 8/31.

I’d always planned on writing the tenth part, but didn’t know exactly where I wanted to take things—I still don’t, exactly, and I think I like writing short stories that way. It contrasts with the way I spend a lot of time structuring and plotting my books.

But anyway, there's still more story kicking around in my head, so I’m going to keep writing it down.

❗❗ Upcoming:

That leads us to what lies ahead! After finishing the tenth part of Strange Harvest, I realized how far I could take this story. On September 21st, I’ll begin posting Strange Harvest: Larval Haze, where we push forward with the lives of the lotus honey harvesters and the native lotus wasps they rely on.

Their toils continue, their troubles mount, and we experience the consequences of tying these human threads into the alien tapestry of Surface.

🌟Strange Harvest: Larval Haze begins 9/21

I’m using this progress to dust myself off, reacquaint myself with my own world, and get back into a disciplined writing schedule. My long term goal is to keep writing 5 pages/week, even if I’m only chipping away.

🎁 Bonus Content:

A little bit about me… well, I recently found out I’m a spreadsheet wizard? Yeah, it’s sort of a Harry Potter type situation, like this underlying power I always had but never knew about. Now all of a sudden I can cast magical spells with data! 🧙‍♂️💻✨

Before the last couple of years, I had never truly used any spreadsheet software in my entire life. I had no idea what I was doing. And then at work, I found myself needing to investigate/analyze data by downloading reports and importing them into Google Sheets. Lucky for me, I had some very helpful and patient colleagues to show me how to do imports, use some shortcuts, and start using formulas.

The first time I understood what a Vlookup was and how to use it, that’s when it started to click. Rows and columns, y’all!! I took some free/low cost GSheets courses on Udemy, YouTube, etc, and that put me on the road to where I am now: I’m learning how to be a data analyst and write SQL queries.

If you’re curious to learn GSheets, check out Leila Gharani / XelPlus on YouTube and Ben Collins’ free Intro to Google Apps Script Course at the Collins School of Data. Oh and make sure to buddy up with ChatGPT if you get lost (ask it to write you a user guide first). ⚡🤖💙

So I made this thing on August 3rd in Google Sheets with ChatGPT’s help. It’s a writing calendar that tracks my wordcount in the GDocs that are in my GDrive using a bunch of Google Apps Script files. The main weekly tracker section is blank because it’s Friday 8/25 when I’m writing this and I haven’t written anything yet this week. 💀

For me, the big motivation is in tracking the wordcount but I also have a list of related goals for each day. As long as I hit 4/8 of those goals every day, I give myself a checkbox for the day. ✔

So even though I haven’t written anything yet this week, I’m still building a streak of checks as long as I’m keeping up with half my goals. I dunno, it’s working so far.

Every time I write, I record my wordcount for each day/hour and my scripts will add to this tab to keep a running total. Some days I only write a little, some days I write more, but in a month I’ve written 6k+ words towards these short stories. At that pace, I could hit 72k words in 12 months which is almost 300 pages. That’s the length of my first book, which took me years to write.

A lot of writers can really churn out content, and I am eternally jealous of all of you.

My hope is with a little discipline and regularly posting my progress like this, I’ll be able to stay much more consistent, even if it’s slow progress. And if anyone’s interested in trying out this system, I’d be happy to share template copies of my sheets and scripts with you! All you need is a Google account.

Thanks for reading!! Keep your eyes peeled for the continuation of Strange Harvest going out tomorrow, as well as Strange Harvest: Larval Haze next month on Sept 21st. Until next time…

Be well,

James Hanlon

8/30/23

Buy Me A Coffee ☕

PS - There seems to be a budding community of fiction writers around here which is really encouraging and I’m trying to learn how people are doing things. So far I’ve found some pretty helpful/compelling examples and advice for newbies (not all fiction writers, but all helpful):