STATUS: Thursday, June 23rd

The Daily Report

Yesterday during a conversation with Jack, I mentioned that I have been having a terrible week on multiple fronts. I was sick, I was exhausted, we were broke and low on supplies, I was stressed… and I still feel pretty good about what I’ve accomplished. I’ve still hit the most important marks for the week.

One thing about the nature of this business is that it’s always experimental. You can’t be afraid to try new things. New things aren’t always going to work, and when they do work, it won’t always be right away. It can be hard to spot the difference between “not working” and “hasn’t worked yet”, but I don’t think my online writing class notion is going to catch fire in its current form. I’m sure I have something of value to sell, but I’m not sure how to package and market it. It’s something I’ll have to think on.

The ideal response when you recognize that an idea has gone nowhere is to move on and try something else. It’s not a failure in any greater sense. All the money it didn’t make me is not money that I had but lost. I’m not sure what the next big experiment will be, but it’ll be something.

In the meantime, I’ve got my slow but steady build on both my Patreons.

Financial Status

Well, we’re now in the last week of the month. I don’t get paid at midnight of July 1st on the dot or anything like that, but I do feel more secure with the month almost over.

The State of the Me

A little tired, but pretty good.

Plans For Today

Well, I’ve got a chapter draft of Tales of MU that I want to go over before posting. I’m mostly going to be kicking around writing stuff for the rest of the day.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

A little stock-taking.

So, the one work thing that I’ve been a little anxious about is the short story for June. I’ve checked every other item on the patron goody list for the month, and while I was pushing back writing it for a few different reasons, every time I looked at the calendar and saw how many (or few) days were left in the month, I got a little nervous.

I’ve always known that I can write a short story in a single day, but it kind of has to be the right day. That is, I can’t sit down every day and do it, however much I’d like to. But when I have an idea? I have a pronounced tendency to kick out the first draft in a day, whether it’s 2,000 words or 12,000. In fact, I can’t think of a single story in the short story format that’s not part of something bigger where the major act of writing took me more than a day, and where I ever finished the story. I have stories I finished in a day, and I’ve got half-finished drafts.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I wound up writing June’s short story today. It needs what I call the “action/description pass”, as many of my stories do, which is both a general editing/polish pass and me going through and adding more visual descriptions and incidental physical business. I’ll probably post the story for my patrons tomorrow. As I teased on Twitter, it’s a story about two women trying to have a conversation in public, and one of them makes bees.

I’ve made the decision that my MU updates are going to go on Tuesday and Friday rather than Tuesday and Thursday. T-Th appeals to my sense of symmetry, but it means I have most of the week between updates on one end, and a day between them on the other. Tuesday and Friday makes the gap between when I have to have a story finished and posted and when I have to do the same for the next one a lot more even. I’ll probably make this change official next week.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.