Friday, February 3rd

THE DAILY REPORT

I'm up a bit earlier than usual today because my stomach decided I didn't eat enough yesterday. Assuming I don't crash out later in the day because of this, this could be a good thing as I've been sleeping later than I like lately.

Long-running D&D-inspired web comic The Order of the Stick is doing a Kickstarter to raise funds to reprint the older compilations. I'm not pointing this out because it needs a signal boost... the goal of $57k was surpassed almost right away and the total is currently over $400k. And it's still going, and there are some kick-awesome benefits being offered for even $10.

Yeah, the reason I'm pointing this out is just to highlight the fact that an entirely indie comic where people can read the archive for free has raised almost half a million dollars from people in order to produce dead tree editions to sell. And about a third of the backers are contributing at a level that's too low to include an actual book as reward.

The point of this is not to say "Draw a stick figure comic based on D&D and you will raise $400,000." There is only one Order of the Stick, just as there is only one Penny Arcade and only one of any other commercially successful web comic. There is room for more than one commercially successful web comic, of course. There are enough of them that they can't be called flukes.

The point is: there is money here. People will pay to support things they care about. People will "buy" what they can get for free.

There have been so many examples of this that it should feel kind of silly to still be pointing it out in 2012, but there are still people out there who want to treat each example as an exception.

STATE OF THE ME

Again, woke up early and hungry. Feeling pretty good otherwise.

PLANS FOR THE DAY

Well, being up a few hours before noon gives me plenty of time to stretch myself, so I think I'm going to go ahead and proceed with the "two ahead" thing. There might be a blog post about some of the other things that I'm working on, if I need a palate cleanser midway through the afternoon.

Mid-day and general report.

So, I started the day with a flash fiction story that is about super speed, appropriately enough. I wrote a thousand words of The Pleasure Craft Corsair, which is about a woman who sells herself into the service of an eccentric airship owner as a means of escaping from her life. The sexual themes are trans (male and female), D/s, and sadism. That's definitely something marketable but I'm not yet sure what I'm going to do with it, and it's not going to be done for a while... it's shaping up to be at least a novella.

I also wrote a vore story, for people who are into pixies being eaten. I post to that site on a semi-regular basis. Most of the stuff I write for it is stuff that actually doesn't ~*quite*~ hit my own buttons (at least not head on), but I've been trying to stretch myself this past month or so.

For this month my major goals are: build and maintain a lead on Tales of MU chapters, finish a draft of By Half Measures (not committing to publishing it this month because I think the initial manuscript is rather sterile and it might need a bigger second pass than I usually give things), and get geared back up on writing Dangerous Instrumentality. I have all the materials for it in my Google Docs account now, and just need to put it together and find the groove.

I do have a few smaller things cooking on the side (some of which could blow up into bigger things once some of the other big things are out of the way). One of the things I'm proud of is a eulogy of sorts for Hamlet by Horatio, entitled, "By The Card, or A Retort to a Certain Whoreson Scot". The working title was "Fuck You Very Much, Orson Scott Card." The new version is slightly more subtle. It started off as something I was writing to submit to Circlet Press. It might end up being that, but I'm not sure the finished product is going to fall into their milieu. Or that it will be finished in time for submission. I'm proud of the beginning but that's all I have so far, a beginning.

I am working on a lot of things at once here, which is something I tried to do when I first quit my day job to go full time. I think the mistake I made was trying to do everything as a serial, which is what I did since that's how Star Harbor Nights started and that's how Tales of MU found success. But not everything works as a serial, and more importantly, that's a lot of deadlines and not a lot of leeway. I can probably write a thousand words of The Pleasure Craft Corsair or By Half Measures every day while meeting my MU obligations, but not necessarily the same ones on the same days, and the thousand words I write won't necessarily be the final polished thousand words that come next in the story.

I've always known that I have it in me to be a very prolific writer. That's why I was sure I could handle all the serials... I know better now, but I also know more and more about how to unlock my potential, how to let the words flow and keep them flowing. Some of the stuff I'm writing has limited appeal and some of it just doesn't pan out, but I'm writing and I'm enjoying it.

End of day.

So, I got ~5,400 words today, including ~2,600 of next Wednesday's Tales of MU... not finished, not even just waiting for an end, but a darn good start. My early morning started to catch up with me towards the end of the day. I have a terrific headache and I've clearly been writing too much pseudo-refined-old-timey dialect if I just used "terrific" to mean "terrible".

So, a productive day. If I didn't quite hit my goal, I have a good start for next week.

Going Window(s 7) Shopping

So here is what I'm thinking for my next laptop computer. It is an inch and a half bigger than what I have now but weighs exactly the same... the weight is a big concern for me, as it's a big part of why a full-sized laptop is difficult for me to manage even when I'm not traveling with it. The laptop that my current netbook replaced, I used to set on top of a laundry hamper that was at about the right height.

It's available in black, but I like the blue... I'm moving out of the phase of wanting all of my electronics to be one color. Having colors makes them harder to misplace, for one thing.

It's a bit higher priced than my anticipated range, but I'm going to be saving for it for longer than I expected. Might as well get something nice.

And of course, it's wishlisted in case anybody feels extra supportive of their freelance weblit author. I was very fortunate in that regard the last time around, but the last time was more of an emergency. My old netbook is clearly on its way out but is still usable, and while more options for places to write are always better, I'd have options even if the netbook failed completely.

UPDATE: Wow, it's been taken care of. I honestly wasn't expecting that.