Monday, August 11th

The Daily Report

I am having a really encouraging month in book sales, even more so considering that the great run started before I put up the new omnibus for the month. Off the top of my head, I think I'm already into my top 3 or 4 months of all time. If this proves to be a trend, then I could find myself less at the mercy of when Patreon happens to pay out in future months. Still waiting on that for this month, though it's still not yet the 15th of the month, meaning that this is a problem with my planning rather than with their system.

I don't want to grouse too much, as Patreon has always done what they promised and usually more... it's the "usually more" that got me a little too reliant on the payouts happening at the very start of the month. I'm overall very happy with the service, especially since we're getting very close to my next benchmark of $400/month, at which point I will be implementing an ad-free for patrons viewing option on the Tales of MU site (account creation and login required). You can help put us over the top at http://patreon.com/alexandraerin... though I probably won't be able to implement a major site change until the end of the month at the earliest, as I just have my phone and my tiny netbook for the next few weeks.

This is because I arrived in Florida over the weekend, where I'm keeping my mother company for a couple of weeks. I've arranged things so there's not a lot of writing that needs to be done to keep up my posting schedule during this time just to protect the publishing schedule. This doesn't mean I'm not planning on writing... this will just make it easier to move things around and roll with the changes in routine that come with a change in location.

Actually, I'm looking forward to likely doing more random writing while I'm here, as I'll actually be getting quite a lot of time to myself and also, I've been getting really comfortable with my new phone.

The State of the Me

Even though I didn't change time zones, travel still tends to leave me fatigued, especially as my insomnia ramps all the way up the night before a plane trip. The weather's also a bit draining... August in Florida is quite a bit warmer and way more humid than August in Maryland has been, especially as we've been enjoying a fairly mild late summer compared to what I'd feared. I've slept well the two nights I've been here, though, and so I'm slowly bouncing back.

Plans For Today

Today's Monday, which means I'm going to be spending time brainstorming for the next slate of MU chapters. I don't know that I'll actually succeed in writing the target of four new chapters this week, but if I can even get 1,000 word stubs/seeds for each of them, or write at least two of them, I think I'll be in good shape for not losing momentum when I return home to Maryland.

I have a chapter to post this afternoon. It's already in pretty good shape, though I'll still be giving it an hour of added attention before posting it, as is my habit.

Status update.

Things are going *really* well with my planning/writing/polishing/posting process.

A couple of weeks back, I started doing a thing where each week, on Monday I would try to draft out what I'm going to be doing in the next four chapters, and then write one of those chapters each day of the work week after that. The weeks I've done it so far, I have never yet succeeded in actually coming up with a solid knowledge of what I'd be doing for all four chapters, just gotten enough of a head start that it wouldn't be too frantic figuring it out as I go.

Today I found myself for the first time in the position of having more than a week's worth of chapters in a relatively finished state (any chapter that needs an hour's work or less to be posted is what I consider to be "done" for purposes of working ahead), and since today's kind of a slow day in general I decided to take some time and look at/work on all three of this week's chapters as a unit.

I'm very glad I did, because I found ways to strengthen all of them and tie them together, but I also realized some things that are missing in between them and what I had slated to be the next two to follow (i.e., next week's chapters). So I started re-numbering the ones that I have, and adding placeholders for the "missing" ones, that are just a file with the right name/number and a single sentence description of what needs to happen in them.

I did that for two such missing chapters, and then it hit me that before I had even sat down to do it, I had half my week's writing planned out.

So I did the same thing for two more chapters--the ones that come after the seven that I already have files for, those being the five done ones and the two seeds I just planted--and now I have my outline/plan of attack for writing this week. All four chapters accounted for.

This approach is working really well for me. I know that writing four chapters in five days must seem terribly frantic to spending four or five days on a single chapter, but I'm using the same basic process I perfected while doing the four day cycle: at the start of the week, figure out what the chapter is about (conception/seeding) four four chapters, then on the day I write each chapter, I figure out how/where to start writing early on in the day, and then... unless the momentum happens to come out of nowhere and words flow from my fingers like water, I walk away for a bit and come back in the afternoon to flesh out that beginning into as close to a completely finished chapter as I can in 2-3 hours of writing.

That's the first three days of the four day cycle: conceive, start, write.

Then on the day that the chapter is scheduled to be posted, I do day 4: polish/finish. And while I'm committed to giving every chapter a final once-over on its publishing day, the fact that they're all sitting there for days or potentially weeks before being published means that's likely to just be the final coat of polish after many.

And along those lines, I'm thinking I'll just make Monday the editorial/planning day in general... every week, I'll start my Monday off by looking over the chapters I have to post for that week (and to an extent, the next chapters after, if I have more than one week in the hopper at the moment). This way, not only will those chapters have an extra coat of polish, but later in the day when I go to plant the seeds for the week's writing, I'll have a much stronger feel for where things are in the story.

I really have to credit that ilys.com site for impressing on me how important it is to have a clear division between writing and editing as phases of the process. It really is making a difference. I think this run of chapters I'm in now will be not just some of the best written chapters, but the best edited and most cohesive.

I'm still not sure how much actual writing I will get done in the coming week, though I'm fairly confident I can get the required two to three hours of writing every day, and completely confident I can get it two days, which is all I'll need to be on target for next week.

Just because I know that tomorrow is going to be busy and the day I'm least sure of my writing, I might actually jump in and start writing this afternoon, after a short breather to get out of editor mode and into writer mode.