Friday, January 10th

The Daily Report

There are two important skills I've managed to add back to my toolbox.

One is the knack of pulling out my phone when inspiration hits and just start writing. I was thinking about the next chapter last night before I went to sleep and I had a dialogue exchange I wanted to get down. So I got it down. I can't tell you how often I've had a solid idea for where to begin a chapter or story and thought I would get to it in the morning and then found it was gone. Same thing with being out and about and having an idea. I had a short story (or possibly a prose poem) idea that I'd been trying to remember for ages, but all I could really remember about it was that I'd thought it was good. It finally came back to me yesterday while I was out to lunch, and so I wrote a few lines... just enough to get the idea fixed down.

This might not seem like much of a skill, but... creativity is a habit. There are reasons that so many writers become superstitious about their tools. It's taken me a long time to get my phone integrated into my creative routine well enough that I consistently think of it in the heat of the moment when it matters, and then I'm comfortable enough to ignore it in my hands and just let words flow out.

The other skill is to sit down and start working (or if I'm already sitting down, just start working) whenever. As I've learned, the trick isn't avoiding distractions because the problem isn't that things are distracting, it's that I'm distractible. Learning to manage my own distractibility and channel it was a huge step forward.

The State of the Me

Well, after starting work at five in the morning yesterday, I was pretty tired last night, so I slept pretty soundly and woke up at a far more usual time this morning, so I'm doing pretty well.

Plans For Today

Today's day 2 of the writing cycle, which is the day I start writing the chapter. Eagle-eyed readers may notice I actually did this last night. Four lines of dialogue can be enough of a seed to start writing around, but it's not exactly what I call getting the job done. There will probably be times when I struggle all day to come up with that much of a beginning that I like, in which case I'll take it, but I can do better than that today.

The other things I'm going to work on are the last PDFs and a newsletter for this weekend.

The FPS Employee blog is also going to be updated at some point during the day. I'm not sure when exactly, yet... I want to pick a time that would be plausible given the logistics of the situation and bearing in mind a two hour time difference.

I'm writing this thing in my newsletter about Patreon...

...and it's spawned some thoughts about the way I've benefited from Patreon even though I haven't had a single payday from it yet (first one coming at the end of the month).

The main benefit is in the immediacy provided by its feed. My most prolific periods as a writer have been the ones where I shared most freely, but despite my championing of the "give it away for free" model, it is hard to make a living when you're giving everything away for free. But holding back... well, it makes me hold back.

Just having a space where without setting up my own password system or anything like that I know I can go and post things and say, "This is what I'm doing. This is what I'm working on. This is a thing that I wanted to write so I wrote it." is a huge and pretty direct benefit.

With just under 20 sponsors, I don't get a ton of feedback on the things I post... but enough to know that people are seeing it, which is really all I need to swing the pendulum from "I don't know if it's worth it to write this" to "this is totally worth it".

That's an emotional determination that's crucial to the writing process. I can want to write something... I can be fairly certain it will be decent if I do... but actually starting to write it and then carrying through to the end depends on being able to convince myself on a deep visceral level that it will be worth it, which is a different matter entirely.

If you want to get in on the fun of my feed or you want to read this newsletter when it goes out, go sign up to pledge: http://www.patreon.com/AlexandraErin My goal for January is to wind up with over $100 per cycle there, which seems very doable as we're only $20 away, but only pledges made before next chapter goes up next Wednesday will count on this month.

I have gotten so much done today, you have no idea.

Among other things, I've completed the task of getting all my stories and e-books available in four formats (mobi, epub, pdf, and html) and next week I will be updating <a href="https://sellfy.com/alexandraerin>my bookstore</a> accordingly. Moving donors who selected "Everything I Have To Give" have now been sent their e-book packages. It's been a long and productive day, and so I'm looking forward to writing during the final block of the afternoon. ...I just realized looking back on what I've done that I left one book (Gift of the Bad Guy) out of the packages (and the conversion process generally), since the master files for that were stored in a different place from everything else as I wrote it during my Google Docs days. I've still got writing to do, so I'm going to save that for Monday.