alexandraerin

So, sometimes in the past I've woken up and just had it in me to write five or ten flash fiction stories all at once. And sometimes I've been able to go a week or so writing one or two a day. Just like opening a tap and letting the words flow. It's a great feeling when that happens, but as much as it feels like turning on a faucet, it really isn't something I can turn on and off.

For a while I was trying to do a three day cycle, but that wasn't quite working. There wasn't enough pressure. Now, pressure is a tricky thing... a lot of times when I start talking about time constraints or benchmarks somebody will pop up to tell me that I shouldn't pressure myself. "No pressure!" The thing is that no pressure might be less damaging than too much pressure, but it doesn't get stuff done. Challenging myself to write a flash story every three days isn't quite no pressure but it's not enough pressure to keep things flowing through the lines.

So here's what I'm going to try now: three day cycle, but continuous and overlapping.

Day one: get idea. Today's idea is will-o-wisps. For the rest of the day I'm going to think about directions to take that in.

Day two: write it. Sit down and try to write out the story I'm envisioning.

Day three: finish it. Maybe it needs an ending. Maybe it needs a coat of gloss. Maybe it needs a rethinking. Maybe it just needs to be posted. Either way, this is the day I wrap it up.

That's the basic plan. Tomorrow, I'm going to be on day two of wisps and I'm going to start day one of another cycle. The day after that I'll start another one. If this pace ends up being totally unmanageable, I'll dial it back down so I've only got two eggs in the air at a time instead of three.

This gives a production target of one story a day. I say "target" because I already know there's going to be some slippage. Having a phone that I can comfortably write on (and the new Google Drive app!) will help there, but there's no such thing as 100% efficiency and life happens. So I'm going to be collecting stories for a week before I start posting them, and the posting schedule is going to be subject to change as I go.

Writing flash stories is important to me because when I'm doing it, I'm able to write more of everything else, and better. It helps me shake the cobwebs out and keep my writing muscles in shape.

So once again I've got about 3,000 words of flash written in a day. Due to the fact that these stories are more varied in length than the ones I wrote last week, I've got eight of them. That's enough to get me through the rest of this week and Thursday of next week. I might very well turn out another one or two later on, but my brain's pretty barren at the moment and we're approaching my Designated Preferred Knock-Off Time.

In order to add a finishing touch to one of the stories, I need some help from someone who has a copy of 2001 A Space Odyssey (the novel, not the film) handy to help me nail down some quotes. The internet is full of 2001 quotes, but they're all from the movie. I have a copy of the book somewhere, but I'm not sure where. It's the sort of book I'm likely enough to have the urge to read in the future that I wouldn't mind throwing a couple of bucks at it on Kindle to get this right, but unfortunately they want $19.95 for it. (Insert standard e-book pricing rant here.)

Aaaaaaaaanyway... there's the scene that's ubiquitous in pop culture with the "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."/"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." exchange. While I know the sequence of events is different in the book (Dave doesn't get trapped outside the pod bay doors) I need for someone who has the book to verify if HAL's line or a similar line appears in the book, or "I can't let you do that, Dave.", or other words to similar effect... and what the words are. Basically, some negative statement from HAL 9000 taken from the book. Context is not terribly important, just the fact that it's a line of HAL telling a human "um... how about no?" The key thing here is that I need it to be an exact quote from the book rather than the movie, and because the movie quotes are so pervasive they're what I come up with when I try to remember the book.

Man, I should have been looking at Kindle stuff earlier. I've had people ask me if I was going to put Tales of MU on Kindle and I didn't really understand what they meant (I mean, I knew it had a web browser and I figured that was good, right?) so I said I'd look into it. Well, now I've looked into it and it's like, wow. This is so easy. I don't really understand why people would pay money to subscribe to RSS feeds of stuff they can read for free, but I'm not turning up my nose at it. I guess I of all people shouldn't underestimate the willingness of people to pay for free content, right?

I'm not even thinking of Tales of MU in particular here... I can use this to monetize Fantasy in Miniature, which is one of the major problems I've had with keeping it going.

Mmmm, the thing about putting Tales of MU on Kindle is to make it really work I'm going to have the RSS stream have the full copy. But you know what? I can do that. I'm big enough, and my ad revenue is a small enough part of my income now that lose some views if people are reading it on their feed-readers. At this point I feel like I should be focusing on getting more eyes on my content... and the cross-promotion I do for my other projects and my fundraising attempts... than on trying to maximize the number of ad views. It wasn't too long ago I was considering axing the ads entirely, after all. It's only the fact that other creators asked me not to that kept them there, and you know, it's really kind of gratifying to see how many other serialists have been able to use the remaining ad spaces for under a dollar a day. I don't want to cut them out from that, but zealously trying to squeeze every pageview out of the ads is just not going to help.

(And of course, I could get ads on the RSS if my survival comes down to that, somehow. But I doubt it will.)

I don't expect this to be a huge revenue stream by any stretch of the imagination, but it's money that will come in just from me doing what I'm doing.

Update: Tales of MU is now available on Kindle. If I get 10 subscribers there today, I'll do an update on Wednesday.

"Now then," said the Tailor to Alice, "I must measure this frock, and then we'll know what size we must make you to fit it."

"What?" said Alice, certain that she must have heard him incorrectly. "But doesn't it make much more sense to measure the person and then make the clothing fit them?"

"Measure the person? Make the clothing fit? Well I've never heard of such a thing. What queer ideas you have," the Tailor said.

"But a person can't help their size," Alice insisted. "It's not possible."

"Then they must be awfully lazy," the Tailor said. "Why, if we did things your way we'd have to make clothing in every shape and size. Our work would never end. So much simpler, so much more sensible, to make our things the right size and the right shape to begin with."

"Okay, you know what?" said Alice. "Fuck this shit, I'm going back to the place with the rabbit and the caterpillar... that world made more sense than this one."

Cross-posted to my flash site.

...and also making a blog post about fundraiser incentives now because if I don't, I'll forget about it when the chapter is finished. I'll be adding the info to the chapter post, too, of course.

Anyway, the total is now up to $830.50... $169.50 to go for the next one, which is the last one that was announced in the previous slate. Here's a reminder of that one, plus the next few:

$1000: Two and Hazel, in a story that shows what happens when people try to take advantage of Two when she's got a little spine and a little friend.
$1250: Some secret history of Jillian Callahan.
$1500: Dee versus some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing.

Just as before, new sponsorships are being counted double. Every bit helps.

For those who don't have any more money to kick my way but want to participate: here's a separate, non-monetary-based incentive for another Two diary: one hundred people twittering links to a story on Fantasy In Miniature. Go there, pick a story, tweet a link to it. There are buttons for it right on the site.

If one considers that it is still Tuesday in some places, then even with some major distractions in a day this makes three days in a row that I've had a major update (Other Tales, Tales, More Tales). The TOMU update on Monday inherited about a thousand words from last week, but the other two were written entirely within an otherwise hectic day.

I'm getting things back on track, folks.

The flash fiction is a big help. When I first started out writing stuff for the online public market, and then again when I moved to doing it full time, I used such short pieces to keep up the flow and keep my brain limber. It takes so little time to write them and people seem to enjoy the results. The problem was that I ran out of ideas too quickly that way. Jack doesn't seem to have that problem... he tells me he already has quite a list to choose from. A lot of them so far have been based around a single word, though some of them are more complicated. I could just pick words myself, of course, but there's a difference between trying to select a word to write a story about oneself and someone else going "I'd like to see what she comes up with for..."

Maybe it'll get tedious for him at some point. If it does, I will hopefully have plenty of momentum built up, and I'll work out a different source for prompts.

I've also been using the Write Or Die program. This program is pretty great for people like me who do their best writing at a brisk pace, but might have problems summoning that pace at need or maintaining their focus. I find I have to set the grace period up pretty high when writing a longer story, otherwise I find myself having to pause it to scroll back up and read over things. The desktop version lets you pause as often as you like, but doing so is counterproductive to the purpose of the program. Better to have a forgiving grace period and keep the timer running.

There's only one incentive left to hit in the first slate of the fall fundraisers. It's Hazel and Two, "kicking ass". I'm torn about how much more to say about it. I have a feeling that if I say exactly what it's going to entail, that will be a huge incentive, but on the other hand, I'd like there to be some surprise. Ah, well. When the next chapter goes up (dare I speculate that it might be tomorrow?), I'm going to remind folks of the fundraising goal and list the next few incentives after it. We'll see what happens there.

And with that, I should be getting to bed. I'll have another long, rambly blog post in the morning with some more details regarding stuff and things and other stuff.