Status Post: Thursday

News For Today

So, the PDF copies of The Gift of the Bad Guy contained two ads between chapters, one for a superhero-themed weblit serial and one for the first book of Meilin Miranda's An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom series. This ad space was given out free of charge in what originated in my brain as a potential revenue stream but evolved into something that's more about building the market up for everyone.

It's really early to tell what impact, if any, these ads will have but I was heartened to see Meilin tweet yesterday about a spike in book sales. Did I have anything to do with that? I don't know. But if you bought a copy of Lovers and Beloveds after seeing the add in The Gift of the Bad Guy, I would love to hear from you! This was a test run, but I'd love to expand this program (by which I mean, get more people and more books involved, not cram the books full of ads. My gut is that more than two or three ads per book would be counterproductive), but only if there's some indication that it helps.

Personal Assessment, Shading Into Introspection And Announcement Of Plans

I made the right call with saying Wednesday's chapter would be up today. My "slowness" yesterday was the onset of my sleep schedule inverting itself again. I was already groggy by the time my housemate got home from work. Later on in the evening Jack was terribly amused by my attempts at chatting. This is all to say that I ended up going to bed at a reasonable hour last night. I didn't make the full shift to diurnal mode... I crashed so early that I woke up at like four in the morning today, though I laid there for another hour or two to see if I wasn't really done sleeping.

Here's Minor Epiphany #2,731 in an ongoing series: I am never going to have a "regular", permanent, stable sleep schedule. All of my attempts to set up a working day and a working week based around clocks and calendars are doomed to failure. How did I do it when I "worked for a living"? Well, the job that I liked the best and made the most money at had flexible hours, and in my department and with my boss they didn't even care if I didn't schedule the days I came in in advance. As long as I got my 40 hours and did three times as much work as anyone else there were no complaints. And even then, the fact that I couldn't skip more than one day entirely each week and that I had to be there 40 hours no matter how much work I did in the hours I was there meant that there were days when I was literally falling asleep at my desk and there were days when I sat there for ten hours and did more work than the person on either side of me would do in the entire week.

To make a long story short*, even when I worked a 9-to-5 job I wasn't working a 9-to-5 job.

Way back when I first started setting my own schedule (or trying to) someone suggested I get myself on the calendar that uses 6 28 hour days, explained by this xkcd strip. I really see that as changing the problem: having a different calendar that I have difficulty keeping track of (and the rest of the world won't be able to remind me of it) and that my body doesn't want to synch up to. But there's a seed of an idea there that I think I can use. It goes back to the fact that my most successful pre-writing job I was basically working a flexible schedule of four work days a week, and is basically an improvement over my attempts to get myself on a work schedule of 4 days a week with a floating "dead day" in there.

Basically, it boils down to this: each week, I work out 4 days' worth of work. These are my Work Days. They do not correspond directly to any day of the week or other calendar unit. They are what I want to accomplish during that week, divided up into four chunks. Day 1 will usually correspond more or less to Monday, but it'll depend on what I'm doing and how I'm feeling and when my "morning" falls. If I'm getting up at 10 PM Sunday night, that's morning of Day 1. If Wednesday or Thursday I am dead tired, as happens so often, then a Work Day doesn't happen then. There may be times when I'm just on fire for the week and I have done four days of work by Thursday. If so, party. If not, it still fits the schedule.

Those task lists I used to do? They were useful but trying to plan them and stick by them on a daily basis doesn't always work. Too often I'd forget things that I really needed to do, or I'd remember things I really needed to do and end up doing them to the exclusion of the list. So the task lists are going to come back, but I'm going to be making four of them at the start of the week. I'll allow myself flexibility in switching tasks between days... if I find myself really in the mood to just plow through something that's slated for Day 4 and it's only Day 2, I'll swap. And if there's a whole day worth of tasks that aren't time sensitive I won't feel constrained to take the days in the order I put them.

Structured flexibility. Flexible structuring. I'd bet money there's a troll reading this who's going to leave a (screened and inevitably deleted) comment about how lazy I am to take a four day work week, but I also bet I end up spending more time actually working productively (though less of my day spent eaten up by "work") and have more to show for it this way then if I sat down at my computer from 9 to 5 every day with the goal of "working".

Random Link

S.J. Tucker reads a poem by Cat Valente.

Plans For Today

Penultimate chapter of Tales of MU. As I said, these are hard to write, but I think I've found a thread to carry me through this one.

So, I went looking at N.K. Jemisin's blog this morning...

...mainly to see if she has a tip jar on it. It sounds weird and maybe she'd be offended by the idea as so many people associate tips/donations with begging, but after hearing from a couple of people about Audible's low royalty payouts I feel like I putting some money in her hands for the books I purchased through them.

I didn't find a tip jar, but I did find one of the best blog posts I've ever read:

I Am The Market.

Excerpt:

So I did some soul-searching, and then decided to take another look at an old trunked novel. I re-read it and thought it had good bones: mortals enslaving gods, political drama, interpersonal angst. And it wasn’t badly-written — though it, too, hadn’t sold. That one hadn’t even gotten me an agent.

And I thought, screw it.

I tossed the file, opened a blank one, and started the whole thing over from scratch. This time I didn’t bother with the rules. I wrote whatever narrative style popped into my head, however crazy and disjointed it sounded. I made the protagonist a girl, since that worked better anyway. I stopped trying to tone down the romance, and I went whole hog with the most cracktastic of my ideas. (“Yeah, a black hole! I don’t care if it couldn’t happen in reality! It’s fantasy, bitchez, I can do what I want!”) I did things all the writing books say not to do — dream sequence infodumps! Constant interruptions to the narrative flow! Cute kid sidekicks! Whatever! This was going to be my book, written the way I wanted to write it.

This part comes after she'd failed to sell books by doing everything "right".

And here's the moral of the story:

And here’s the thing: if I truly believe I’m a good writer, then I need to act like one. I need to stop worrying about what “the market” wants. “The market” consists of people like me, too, after all — people who are tired of what “the market” usually produces. So by writing for myself, I write for them.

And as long as I write my best for myself, I’ll be okay.

My personal take on this has long been that there may be a lot of money to be made doing things conventionally, but there are a lot more people scrambling after a piece of that market. Conventional novels as a class sell really well - a given conventional novel, statistically, won't. This sort of ties into what BioWare's David Gaider recently said in response to a self-entitled troll complaining about the fact that BioWare's Dragon Age games give equal time and attention to women and gay gamers as they do straight male gamers. It wasn't the focus of his comment, but his response touches on the fact that a game like this has a tremendous appeal to some very under-served markets.

Yes, most purchasers of computer games are still straight men. And most games are aimed at them. It's a big market, but by the same token it's a crowded one. A game where you can play as a woman and not have random NPCs refer to you as male? Where you have equal romance options no matter which gender you choose or pursue? And it's all just very matter-of-fact? Hell yes that's going to draw people in. It may alienate some people in what's perceived as the "mainstream" audience, but those people are already spoiled for choice... and that fact is not only significant to the consumers, it's significant to the producers. There's less competition for "gay dollars" than straight ones.

"Be the change you want to see in the world," Gandhi said.

"Write the book you want to read," I say.

"I'm telling the story I want to tell" has long been one of my stock responses to people who wonder why I'm not doing something slightly more conventional. But really, that's just another way of saying "I'm telling the story I want to hear."

So my body decided...

...that we're not done sleeping during the day and being awake all night, after all. I started to crash at around five in the evening and ended up going upstairs at like 6:30 or so. I was woken up a little bit ago by what I thought was a huge fight between no less than two cats, but it was just Dorian having found his favorite toy (a rainbow streamer ribbon thing) and was playing with it in the dark. So that's like four hours or less of sleep but I was only awake for 12 hours before that and I feel pretty awake right now, and I will probably crash pretty hard later.

When? No one knows.

I'm making a decision to cut my caffeine intake way down*. I had it down to some coffee in the morning and the occasional soda when eating out back during my Good Sleep Period, but as I started to sleep worse the soda started creeping back up so that I could spend less time feeling like a zombie. And right now, I have realized, my caffeine consumption is at my high school levels and of course that works against me as I try to get my sleep back under some semblance of control.

Caffeine's tolerance mechanism means that there's a bit of a ratchet effect... it's easy for your consumption level to shift up, hard for it to shift down. I'm going to be doing this gradually. My plan to structure my week and my work days better will help me here, because I'll be able to work this in to it.

*(Note: Anybody who says "You shouldn't drink caffeine at all if you have a problem sleeping!" will get punched in the throat by a bear made out of ninjas who are each in turn made out of many smaller LARGER bears. My caffeine dependency is a response to my insomnia, not the cause of it. If you don't live my life, you don't get to judge the chemical measures I use to stay functional.)