STATUS: Thursday, May 19th

The Daily Report

I’ve decided to resume my formal daily posts. As much as trying to keep them up when I’d hit bottom caused more problems than it solved, they’re a useful tool for structuring my work day and work week, and it gives me a good record of both how I’m doing and what I’m doing.

Objectively, this has been a good week for me. On Monday, I created and shared two things. On Tuesday, I wrote a fairly long short story. Yet yesterday, when I couldn’t get up the focus to produce something, I felt once again like I’m stuck in an uncreative rut, that I am a disappointment and failure because I might go one single day without producing something I can point to and say, “See what I did?” This despite the fact that it was three days into the week and I had already posted three things to my Patreon.

Part of the reason I came up with the idea of posting things as Things of the Day was to make it easier to remind myself that yes, I am doing things and making things that people enjoy. The downside is that it’s become another arbitrary standard to live up to.

The reality is that no week in which I write an entire short story should be seen as a waste, no matter what happens in the rest of it. The reality is that this has been a profoundly creative and successful week, and it’s not over yet.

Mikki Kendall (author, comic book writer, and journalist) has been talking on Twitter about setting up a Patreon where she writes one short story a week. I think of her as a dynamo. I look at all the things she does and I feel humbled. And I know she can do this. But the thing is, I know I can, too. The difference is when she talks about writing a story a week, I say, “Wow, what drive! What talent!” but when I look at myself and think about a story a week, I think, “Well, that’s a start. What else have you got?”

And it’s not that I think I should be doing better than her. I look up to her. That’s just how perverse this kind of thinking can be. When someone I admire is doing something, I can recognize that it’s admirable. With me? I’m stuck with these feelings that if something comes easily, I’m not applying myself and if something takes work, I’m not good enough to do it.

Writing a short story every week for me more or less amounts to writing one in one day. It has to be the right day, I have to have the right block of time and the right idea, but when it all comes together it happens in one day. The one short story I sold externally last year was written in a day. “Walk Briskly” and my long short story in Angels of the Meanwhile were each written in a day. It’s just how I write.

But I find myself thinking, if I could write those stories in one day, and there are five work days in a week, why don’t I have five stories? Or even “just” three or four, to allow for bad days and off days.

I’ve certainly had to tell my share of ill-informed critics over the years that writing is creative labor, not mechanical labor. I can sit at a keyboard and punch buttons to make words come out, but that isn’t the same as making a story come out of it.

Like so many other things of this nature, I can explain this to others and mean it when I say it. The problem is telling it to myself.

I think maybe this is part of why I started floundering when I stopped engaging so much with people who would make the same complaints, the same arguments, the same accusations over and over again. There is no doubt in my mind that dealing with all of that was detrimental to my health and a suck of my time and energy, but it also certainly helped reinforce to me that I knew what I was doing, when I spent a good portion of every week defending myself to people who were sure that I didn’t.

So basically I’ve got two approaches that I know are unsustainable. I cannot be the queen bitch of the internet flame war and I cannot be a shrinking violet terrified equally by the lurking specters of success and failure. It seems like the obvious answer is to strike a balance, but if I knew where that balance was or how to maintain it I wouldn’t be here.

That’s not to say I don’t have any answers, or any plans. I did yesterday hit on the solution to some of my long-term plans regarding the use of Patreon and how I position and sell myself. I think this post is long enough as it is, though, and I don’t want to bury my plan of action under this meandering introspection.

The State of the Me

So, an upper respiratory thing has been making its way through my household and it’s my turn to have it apparently. A little scratchiness of the throat, a runny nose, achy joints, and a little bit of brain fog is the worst of it. Nothing serious. Not even terribly bad fatigue. If not for the aches, I’d assume my allergies were flaring up. This particular ache is always an infection thing for me.

It’s coming at an okay time, all things considered. I’ve already done quite a bit this week, so if it knocks me on my backside tomorrow then no real harm done. I’ll probably be over it by WisCon time next week.

Plans For Today

I’m about to get out of the house in part to try to clear out some cobwebs. Later this afternoon I’ll make a post outlining my plans for Patreon. I may also kick around some flash fiction ideas.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Since I haven’t blogged about my actual life that much lately…

Let me just tell you how my afternoon’s been.

The popping out of the house for a bit wound up taking a bit longer than expected. We were heading to Shepherdstown, after a friend of ours had told us that they have a decent selection of men’s pants. Jack has been looking for more that will fit him, as his waist has shrunk a bit the past few months, but he doesn’t want to buy a bunch of new clothes while his body is still changing shape. We didn’t find anything that fit him there, though I did find a cute red hat that fit me surprisingly well (it didn’t look like it would).

That’s jumping ahead. It took a bit longer than expected, as I said, because we found ourselves on a winding country road behind some large, slow-moving vehicles used for repainting the lines on said road. The day was nice, though, and so was the company, so I didn’t really mind going 10 mph for a good portion of the way there.

The hat was a good find, and it happened to coordinate really well with what I was wearing today, so I took that as a sign and got it.

We headed back to town and stopped at the mall, because Plan B on the pants situation was trying to find some cool suspenders. Jack had a blood sugar situation on the way into the mall, so we popped into a candy store to see if we could find something with a moderate amount of carbs, something to get him pepped up without swinging too far in the opposite direction. Score: something called Gardner’s Candies had a roasted almond chocolate bar that had 11 net carbs per half-a-bar serving. Even better, the bar is divided into easy break away squares, six per half a bar. That’s less than 2 carbs per square.

So that was a nice find.

They have a website. This is the ordering page for their chocolate bar, which has different options; all the non-almond ones had around 50% more carbs, probably because they didn’t have almonds taking up space. Disappointingly, their “nutrition information” link takes you to a PDF that contains a single page on which is written a 1-800 number to call.

Jack did find his suspenders, and he got a new hat, too. I’ve also updated my Facebook profile pic to one that he took today, of me in my new hat.

Nice afternoon out, all things considered.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Okay. So. Business plans.

The fact is, I’ve been doing this crowdfunded on the internet thing longer than almost any author currently active. I was doing it before it had a name, before there were all the tools we have now, and before there were reams and reams of advice to follow on how to do it right.

The fact is, things should have been getting easier for me with the influx of new tools. The fact is also that they haven’t. My peak financial success as an author came before Patreon, before IndieGoGo and Kickstarter.

And the reason for this, I believe, is that rather than using new tools to make my life easier, I’ve been using them to make my life more complicated. Rather than using them to do more of what I was doing, I’ve been listening to other people’s advice about what to do with them, even when it didn’t fit what I’ve been doing.

Where I get into real trouble with crowdfunding… well, it ties into what I was talking about in my status post earlier today. The feeling that I’m not doing enough. I start soliciting money in exchange for the stories I create, and then I feel… and there are those piles of advice out there telling me that I should feel this way… like I have to add something extra, like I need to provide incentives, like a bank giving you oven mitts or a foam beer thingy when you open a checking account.

My dad told me a story once (and then maybe ten or eleven more times after that; we are a family of storytellers) about a new client of his who asked him why he didn’t send out extravagant holiday gifts to remind his clients that he appreciates them, as is common in the business. “My last guy always sent me a turkey,” he said, or words to that effect. My dad’s response was to show him how his account had fared under his stewardship, and tell him, in effect, “Merry Christmas.”

Going forward, that’s going to shape my basic approach to things. No promising turkeys. Once upon a time, I made $1,200 a month in recurring reader donations on the strength of little more than “I’m writing what I want to write, and if you want to read what I write, you can pay me to keep writing it.” I mean to get back to that point and surpass it, also on the same strength.

Now, it’s not just that my business direction floundered in the intervening years. I have also been struggling creatively, mostly because I was struggling cognitively. You go back a bit over six years and I was in a pretty scary place. I had serious, persistent memory problems. I had focus problems. My always (and still) bad sense of direction and poor visual processing of faces was at a debilitating level. I started experimenting with dietary supplements to improve things, and while those experiments are ongoing, I have been improving in a more or less steady direction.

Recent changes to my lifestyle have kicked that into high gear, and then this past few weeks I added a few more touches to my regimen that have me feeling… well, like I did back in 2007, when Tales of MU was new. I mean, I still have anxiety and such. On a purely cognitive level, though, in terms of clarity and strength of mind, I am on top of the world. I’ve been there for a few weeks now, through poor sleep and sickness, even.

So, anyway.

Here’s the plan.

 

The hardest thing for me, using Patreon, has been to figure out how to sell myself on it, basically. What I’m offering. My creative output, at its best, is very eclectic. There’s poetry, flash fiction, my takes on explaining topics, out-and-out opinion pieces, stories, and stuff. Then there’s my biggest historical money-maker, Tales of MU. It’s suffered quite a bit lately, and one of the reasons it’s suffered is that I have a hard time figuring out how to sell it alongside everything else… do I make my Patreon “Tales of MU and the rest” or more, “Here’s everything I do and Tales of MU”?

Well, here’s my solution: I’m splitting my Patreon in two. Two patreons. One for Alexandra Erin In All Her Glory, one for Tales of MU. The Alexandra Erin one is going to be on the monthly plan. The Tales of MU one is going to be on the pledge-for-work plan; meaning, if you pledge $1 per chapter, then I get $1 from you each time I post a chapter. This also adds in some accountability.

The Alexandra Erin one is going to be my current one, because, it’s really not going to change much, especially from what it’s been lately, when Tales of MU updates have become basically quarterly occurrences. Once it’s divorced from Tales of MU, the eclecticness of it all is going to be something that I embrace. I mean, it’s not like people never buy a thing that gives them some current events, some opinion, some humor, some fiction, etc. That’s basically a lot of magazines, right?

So the details are still firming up in my brain and probably won’t settle completely until after WisCon, but starting in June, my creative and insightful output is basically going to, in some form, be shaping up into Alexandra Erin: The Crowdfunded Zine. I’ll still be writing and posting stuff to my blog or directly to Patreon throughout the month, but I’m going to be collecting, collating, and polishing it as I go so that at the end of each month I have a shiny package I can give to my patrons and sell to anyone else who wants it, and that I myself can look at with pride, knowing that yes, I definitely accomplished things this month.

Tomorrow I’m going to be updating my Patreon page and getting the new one in order.

Now, here’s an important thing: if you like Tales of MU and you also want to just support everything that I do, you will not have pledge twice. I’m not going to be like the Coca-Cola company, worrying that sales of Diet Coke are cannibalizing the market share of regular Coke.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.