Wednesday, December 11th

The Daily Report

I was up around nine this morning and at the computer by 10, feeling better than I was yesterday. I decided to dive into some of the "workier" of work tasks, remembering how much it helps set the tone for my day to do things like transcribe chapters from the website first thing in the morning. The idea captured me to the point that I ended up just doing it before I made my status post or anything else... which has kind of thrown off my day from a maintenance standpoint, but I think it's still a net gain.

Before today I'd been leery about starting the third MU Omnibus, lest the Omnibus project get too far ahead of the commentary one. But then I realized that was a completely arbitrary association. The Omnibus is for people who just want to read the series offline/formatted for their gadgets.

I think my reluctance to keep the Omnibus project moving has contributed to my... not exactly not exactly floundering, but maybe doggy paddling? An important part of flow is knowing the way forward, having clear instructions and goals. Compiling chapters into books is a task that's always available, has a tangible reward, and is occasionally challenging (figuring out where to divide the chapters into books), but has clear parameters.

The State of the Me

Doing well. Energy high, confidence high.

Plans For Today

Today's day 3 of the cycle, which is the major writing day for the next chapter. Today, I'm going to be fleshing out the body of the chapter.

As a sidenote: in the past, I paired this writing process up with the idea of writing as performance by sharing my drafts as I wrote them. I stopped doing that mainly because the cross-posting of this blog made that kind of cumbersome, and eventually created errors when the entries got too long for Livejournal to handle.

I'd like to return to that practice, but I'm not 100% sure how I want to do it. I *can* share things I'm writing in Word 2013 through my SkyDrive, but I don't do all of my draft work in Office. I could keep a separate document to paste substantial revisions into. I'll be thinking about it, and trying something in the next few chapters.

New patronage model.

So, one of the things that makes my writing/publishing model possible is the existence of tools that handle things for me that aren't the writing. It's the existence of tools for things like hosting content, e-commerce, etc., that even makes it possible for me to do anything that I do.

And now I've discovered a new potential tool that automates the micro-patronage system I've been using. It's called Patreon. They describe themselves as being "like Kickstarter", but for ongoing things instead of single projects.

The basic idea is that when you sign up to patronize an artist/creator, you pledge to pay them every time they release a new piece of work, up to a monthly maximum. I'm still looking at it, but I think this means that you could pledge $1 every time Tales of MU updates with a $5 maximum. With one update a week it would be $4 or $5 a month, but if I started also doing bonus stories you wouldn't go over the $5 limit.

So, this has advantages all around over the "by hand" methods of patronage I've been using. It seems easier to get into (which is an advantage for both the producer and the consumer), it's tied to actual production, etc. It also provides engagement tools.

As I said, I'm going to have to look at it more closely before I actually do anything with it. But it seems promising.