Monday, January 6th

The Daily Report

So, over the weekend I made some slight tweaks to my presentation on Patreon. It's become apparent that while the income stream is tied to Tales of MU (since that's the thing that can be delivered with predictable consistency), the personal benefits to sponsors are largely going to be in the form of the other stuff that it frees me up to write, so I've changed my project name to Tales of MU and other stories.

I've also refined the funding targets. The initial two goals I had were basically placeholders; I've set new ones that more closely correlate to my actual income needs from the sight and the current apparent demand.

I initially set the new ones a little bit higher than they are now with the thought that it would be easier to tweak them downwards if the momentum was lacking than it would be to tease them upwards if I enjoyed a runaway success. But upon reflection, I decided it was better to set goals I could be more confident of hitting from the beginning. When I hit the highest goal ($1,200), I'll have the breathing room to figure out some more awesome things for higher-level triggers.

The other thing I did over the weekend is set up a new blog site where I'll be posting the thing I wrote last week, as an alternate reality-style story. There's not much to look at there right now and things won't really heat up until next week, but you can bookmark the site or put it in your reader.

The State of the Me

Feeling okay. Sleep was moderately poor last night. Today I'm beginning an alteration to my eating habits in solidarity with Jack, who has a restricted carb intake. Breakfast was sausage, bacon, and a small piece of toast, so it's at worst a lateral move. I've been missing the benefits of an early morning protein injection. I need to remember to get eggs next time we go grocery shopping.

On an emotional/psychological well-being level, I finally have a copy of The Muppet Movie soundtrack... not only is it back in print (when I added it to my wishlist, it was going for $50 or $60 a copy) but Amazon apparently has an "auto rip" deal on (some?) CDs where ordering the disk adds the MP3s to your account, which worked out well since Jack wanted the CD and I don't want to accumulate any more physical media in my life, where I can avoid it.

Plans For Today

Before lunch, I'm going to be PDFing and fulfilling PDF-related perks. Today is day 2 of the MU writing cycle, which means I'm going to be beginning the chapter in the afternoon. The thing I've been writing ended up being my test case for sharing my drafts through Patreon, so expect to see that (if you're a sponsor there). If you don't want to see sausage being made (or don't want to see out-of-context spoilers), don't worry... you'd have to click on the link for the document to see any of the text.

On the subject of perk fulfillment...

...there's still a surprisingly large number of people who haven't given me the details of what they want. If you supported my moving fundraiser and don't remember seeing a message about this, search your inbox for "thank you for funding me", which is the subject line I used for the emails. In retrospect, I can understand someone not realizing it was more than a form message generated by the system or something.

Also, I totally sympathize with anyone who didn't answer immediately and then started feeling self-conscious about keeping me waiting or wondering if they'd missed the window where it's socially acceptable to reply or whatever. I'll say again: there's no hurry, and no expiration date. Here I am myself three months later, still figuring out parts of the perk fulfillment myself. There's no expiration date here. Ten years from now, if someone suddenly remembers they didn't claim a 99 cent short story and sends me an email about it, I'll be happy to do it. This is yours. You've earned it.

I'm going to go back and poke the people I haven't heard from, but after I finish everything else. If you're not hurried, I'm not.

On the subject of patience and perk fulfillment, I'd like to apologize to everyone who's been waiting on a holiday card. We got them made, but a combination of extreme weather and unexpectedly heavy personal stuff has kept me from getting them sent out before the holidays. They will be mailed this week. In the meantime, know that you were all very much in our thoughts this our first holiday season together.

Tuesday, January 7th

The Daily Report

Well, I had a pretty good day yesterday. Very focused, very successful in my immediate goals, and I came out of it feeling good. I shared the draft file for the next chapter of Tales of MU on my Patreon feed (though it's a sponsors only post)... and I have to tell you, I've really missed the feeling of writing before an audience. I think doing so was one of my better decisions, and stopping was one of the worse ones. It was driven more by circumstances than reason.

I really like to have immediacy in my writing. I don't think I could have written a blog story 40+ days in advance like I did over the weekend if I didn't have the opportunity to share it in advance.

The State of the Me

Sleep was a little fragmentary. I kept being woken up by the wind rattling the windows, which was pretty loud on the big blasts. I'm feeling okay right now, though I may end up laying back down for a few hours at some point.

Plans For Today

Today's going to look a lot like yesterday. PDFing, then writing.