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News For Today

Well, the fundraiser's started to really take off in earnest. One of my tasks for tomorrow (formerly a task for yesterday) is to re-write the fundraiser post so that it's more concise and bullet-pointy. I'll make a blog post that explains things in greater detail.

The Gift of the Bad Guy has officially broken even. The money I sunk into producing it has been made back. Next week's "technical day" I will be working on getting it onto Amazon and Smashwords, which should help boost the income quite a bit.

And in a final bit of news, I'm posting this on Dreamwidth. I have it set up so it should cross-post to Livejournal automatically. If you follow me on Livejournal, know that I have no plans to abandon LJ at the moment. But given the level of their troubles and the extent to which I rely on my blog as a productivity and communication tool, a backup is in order.

Personal Assessment

I have both less pain and a greater degree of mobility in my arm. It doesn't seem like it's going to interfere with computering today.

I slept okay.

I'm feeling fine, mentally.

Dreams From Last Night

I was running a D&D game at the Colonial in Memphis. No special guest appearances. Flabberghast really was the combobreaker, I guess.

Plans For Today

I'm going to go throw a flash up at Fantasy in Miniature, then my one task for the day is writing the next chapter of Tales of MU. Giving over an eight hour work day to it worked out so well and felt so good on Monday. This is Friday's chapter, so if I finish it today it won't go up immediately, but I won't be waiting until Friday night in that case.

Magic Under Construction: TOMU V2 #2

Started: 11:00 a.m., 4/7/2011
Status: In Progress.
Last updated: 5:30
Word Count: ~5200
Hours Writing: 3.5


( Spoilers! )

Halo: Planning Evolved

Okay, so I'm about midway through writing the next chapter of Tales of MU. And when I paused for reflection on how to improve and continue it, I realized I really want to expand the beginning part with Ian more. Give him a proper introduction in the volume, give new readers a proper introduction to the sexual and sensual aspects of the story, etc. And I realized that will give a chapter that splits pretty evenly into two segments: Ian, and Amaranth. And I thought, "Well, that's good." Each of Mackenzie's lovers introduced in turn.

But then I thought how weird it's going to be to have a chapter segmented like that, and I thought that with my current plans to have all largish chapters (5,000 words = 20 pages) is going to result in a lot of segmentation.

And then I thought, "If I split it into two chapters, then I'm already looking at 'bloat' to the timeline I wanted to follow for book 1." But my concern there is not about how many chapters it takes to get somewhere... a "chapter" is not a concrete unit of story, time, or space. It's about how much real world time.

But my next thought that followed on the heels of that one was, "But if I already have Monday's chapter done-ish because it's branched off from this one, I can do a chapter on Wednesday and Friday next week and be right back where I was."

And then the lightbulb came on.

I settled on two updates a week because trying to do more consistently introduced too many chances to fail. It's not a matter of volume of words produced. My three-updates-a-week periods generally had around 9,000 words. When I was doing 5 updates a week, the chapters were shorter... maybe around 2,000 words, so 10,000 words total. Two updates of between 4 and 6 thousand words? Right in line with everything else.

The key factor is that it's easier for me to make sure I have two days I can sit and do serious writing in than it is to make sure I have three days or five days.

So here's what I'm thinking now. I'm going to go ahead and write what I'd planned on writing for Friday. But I'm going to post half of it (about 3,000 words... my good ol' standby.) And the other half is going to go up on Monday. Monday I'm going to write another 5 to 6 thousand words. That's Wednesday and Friday's chapter. Some other day next week... Wednesday or Thursday... I'll write another 5 to 6 thousand words. That's next Monday and Wednesday.

If I have an off day? If I have 3,000 word day or even a no thousand word day? Meh. First of all, I only need to be able to muster one and a half heavy writing days per day to keep up with the demand... writing MU heavily two days a week will give me a buffer. I don't expect the buffer to last long because Stuff Happens, but it will be a regenerating buffer. When I've tried building a buffer before it was based on the idea of things like writing four days a week and posting three. It's way too easy to stumble there, and having a break between days when I'm writing MU really helps.

Within a day, the momentum of just working on MU is very helpful. But from day to day, I need to be able to turn my mind towards other things, and to let my mind wander over possibilities without immediately having to write them down.

So, anyway... the chapter breakdowns I talked about for the first book of MU will not work out exactly the way I said. There will be a minimum of three chapters to cover the weekend (possibly four... slightly shorter chapters allows for more gradation of time, which seems to me to be a good thing) instead of two. But in terms of how fast in real time the story moves along and how much space is allotted to various things, I'll be more or less in the same neighborhood.

And while I'm finding that spending a whole day writing on one subject/project works best, this plan is flexible enough that if I have a week that's busy with other things I can spend a few hours each day writing so I don't lose my whole buffer.

This might seem premature but I'm not going to announce a Wednesday update until it's Monday and I have the chapters for the rest of the week done. If that happens... if I have a writing day on next Monday like I've had this Monday and like I'm having today, then I think I'm really on the right track in terms of what I've been doing differently.

That's enough talking about it. Time to get back to writing.

Final score.

Eight hour work day.

Four-ish hours of writing.

7,000 words.

That's about 1,700 words an hour per writing-hour. Just under a thousand averaged out over work-hours. I don't have to work to convince myself that 875 words an hour is okay. I know that's good.

Adding it to the 3,000 words I wrote on Tuesday and the almost 6,000 words I wrote on Monday, that works out to about 3,000 words per day for a five day work week, which pleases me because that's what has always seemed to me to be a good average work day. I'm just discovering that it works better to do it as an average than to strive for it every day.

I have good days. I have bad days. I have average days. I think I can count on having two good days a week most weeks, especially if I'm not beating myself up over the bad days and not pushing myself too hard on the average days. I mean, this week I had a brain-fog day on Tuesday and a day when I was absolutely physically incapable of sitting at the computer and working on Wednesday and here I am on Thursday night (Thursday! I guess I got the hang of it after all?) reporting that I've got an average of 3,000 words a day.

There will be weeks when I don't get two good days, of course but if my publishing schedule means two good days gives me a buffer then those weeks will be okay. I mean, right now I've got Friday and Monday's chapters both done-ish (substantially finished, I know me and I know they'll both get some tweaks and filling out before they go up) and I have a start on Wednesday's.

I'll put Friday's chapter up just after midnight. If I end up needing sleep before then (kind of a crapshoot right now), I can still get it in queue and set up the email notification to go out auto-magically.

I'm going to do a little bit more to fill in some details on the first part later on tonight, between the time Jack leaves work and when he gets home. I'm going to restrict myself to that timeframe for work/life balance reasons. The chapter is closed until then. If I had been planning from the start to split the results up into individual chapters I would have given more attention to the opening part to begin with just to make sure it will stand okay on its own. Now that this is the gameplan I'll do that for the future.

Heh. It's funny... at one point in a previous chapter (much previous), I mentioned doing that before: splitting a chapter in half and then taking the opportunity to expand the first half. I considered that to be a good thing, in that the split allowed me to explore something (two things, in fact, because it was now two chapters) in more detail. The explanation I gave ended up being used on TVTropes as evidence of MU's "filleritis". Just goes to show how subjective these things are. Some people will always clamor for more detail about everything. Some people want things to be a little more selective.

I like TVTropes as a website and a diversion, but my feelings about it are somewhat mixed as I have a commenter right now who seems to think it's a playbook or scorecard. It's not so much that he accuses me of Doin It Rong (much, though he has)... it's more like he fails to notice that I'm not doing what his careful study of TVTropes suggests I would/should be doing and reads the story through a lens that's much heavier on things like Conservation of Detail and people learning Aesops. It's frustrating to deal with comments from someone like that. I suppose I really should learn to ignore them, but when someone addresses a question directly to me as author that's founded on completely faulty premises... well, again, I should really learn to ignore it.

But I can only do so much self-improvement at once.

You know, it's funny to me to realize that I haven't kept up the "work day" scheme I was trying since I first posted about it, basically, but somehow it unlocked the concept of thinking of things in terms of work days again in my brain. Monday, Tuesday, and today I've sat down and spent eight solid hours working. Note that some of that work was sitting here listening to music or getting up and tossing around a ball or taking a bath, but that's work. It's necessary to my writing process to pause to reflect and gather my ideas.

The point is that having eight hours allocated for work... it's working. I feel like I did when I was punching a clock, and that's not a bad thing... at my last job I was one of the most productive and happiest people on the floor. When I'm on the clock now, my mind doesn't stray much to other topics during my "down" times. My browser doesn't stray to other sites during my "up" times. And I'm getting stuff done.

Tomorrow's my tech day, belated due to injury on Wednesday. We'll see how well the concept translates. And then Monday I'll be writing for the rest of the week. Again, we'll see how well this all works after a weekend. I think I've got it, though. I'm not going to announce three updates a week unless Monday ends with me having three updates in the bag but it's in sight.

Edit-Dendum:

I just want to add about this whole work day thing... if I felt the slightest bit guilty about taking Wednesday off, the whole thing would fall apart. In the past (especially when I allowed anonymous commenting on my blog) I've had people viciously attack the idea of me having a work ethic when my schedule took a hit from sleep problems or whatever, and as I've said before, it takes a degree of brazen confidence to be a writer. You have to be fairly shameless to look at a blank page or an empty screen and say, "I can do better than that." That, and if you believe you're lazy and shiftless, it's hard to dig in and get to work.