alexandraerin

Can't sleep. Creative brain isn't awake to write. So I've put what I hope are the finishing touches on the The Gift of the Bad Guy Kindle Edition and sent it off for review.

I've been having good results on the self-published version (in EPUB and PDF) with the sale price of 49 cents, so I'm going to leave it up for a while. That sale price is not going to be a permanent feature, but I'd kind of like to get a "critical mass" of copies out there.

Sales of the special Author Appreciation Editions (also available on that page, scroll down) are going to be closing on May 21st so I can draw a line underneath GOTBG and move on to other projects. Because of technical limitations, I'm not able to offer AAEs in Kindle format, though the PDF version works fine on Kindle and looks pretty sharp.

Top two questions I get these days are both from people who are eager to see the next newsletter, so I guess it's a hit. They are "When's the next one coming out?" and "Is there some way I can pay in advance instead of setting up a subscription payment?"

The answer to the first question is the last week in May... this way I have a whole month to accumulate content for it.

The answer to the second question is, yes, yes there is. I got like half a dozen inquiries along that line after the April newsletter went out, so I set up a "just send me the newsletter" payment plan. It's a one-time thing, gets you the newsletter for a year. The price is flexible. Default price is $25, which is just over $2 a month. It goes as low as $10 and as high as $100. So far most folks have been content to buy in at the $25 level.

The newsletter has generated way more "fan mail" than anything else I've done. It's really quite incredible.

On another note, in order to get more grist for Fantasy In Miniature I'm considering taking a page from other crowdfunders and doing a thing where people who make a donation to the site can provide a prompt. I'd put a "stock" limit of 3 or 5 or some other small number so I don't get buried... assuming there would be enough demand to bury me, of course. I'd put a field on the story to credit the prompter and list the actual prompt. If I do this, I think I'll name the service "For Prompt Payment and Speedy Insertion", which discerning readers will note is a reference to the greatest Edgar Allen Poe story of all time.

That's "if". Right now this is just an idle idea. If it tickles anybody's fancy, feel free to say so... an enthusiastic response can be the difference between "if" and "when"... though it would still be a "when". I've got a lot going on right now, so this would probably be a late June or July thing.

Anyway, I'm getting sleepy again... time to go upstairs and hit the floor.

Okay, so last night I sent out the second issue of newsletter, "Alexandra Erin's Spoiler Alert" (so-called because one of the highlights of it is stuff that's not otherwise ready for publication). I offer this newsletter as a perk to people who are regular monthly sponsors.

Today I received a bunch of inquiries in my inbox from people who signed up for the free trial of the newsletter and who would like to keep receiving it, but for various personal, financial, or technical reasons a regular monthly deduction from a PayPal account is not an option for them. I've received requests for allowing alternative options, including such things as manual monthly payments or a single annual lump sum.

After considering all the angles... including the fact that the newsletter does not in itself generate enough income for me to make administering it a significant portion of my job... I've decided to come up with a way of accommodating what I see as the root common desire, which is the ability to pay for the newsletter without setting up a recurring sponsorship.

So I've added the option to buy an annual subscription to the newsletter, if that's all you want. I'm sticking with my "choose-your-own-priceventure" thing, because that's worked out well for me so far.

You can find the options here, at the bottom. The prices start at $10, which is $2 cheaper than paying for the cheapest sponsorship option for a year... but I've set it to default to $25, which is still appreciably cheaper than the most common sponsorship option ($5 a month).

News For Today

Since so many of you (i.e., two) have asked: yes, I have decided - I will be repeating Fundraiser Friday for the remaining two Fridays in the month. The first one was a success in every sense: brought lots of activity to the race, saw the leader change several times, and there are a few comments from participants citing that it made them feel like their relatively smaller contributions mattered more.

I'm thinking of dropping the doubling for incentive purposes, though... we've already racked up quite a few of those and I don't want the pile to get too deep. I'm not sure.

Contributions will definitely count double for voting purposes on Friday, though. And since I'm actually deciding this one in advance, it'll start at midnight on Friday.

Personal Assessment

I'm pretty fine. It just occurred to me this morning that I've been waking up multiple times in the middle of the night a lot lately, and it hadn't registered to me as something worth noting because that's been normal for so much of my life. This might have something to do with the slight... not exactly malaise, but this week I just feel moderately less... well, just moderately less.

Dreams From Last Night

It was weird. Like a cross between My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Super Mario Galaxy, but set in the real world and featuring something like an adorable cartoon vashta nerada. Like, I was going around all these real places and there would be things like patches of living shadow wearing cartoon eyes and a lot of them were accessorized (like living shadow with a hat), and any time I found them I had to stop what I was doing to bargain with it, 10th Doctor style ("Let me find you a home or I'll destroy you."), and even though I was just myself in this dream, realistically rendered and with no other obvious superpowers, there were four different headquarters I could return to from any point in the world by jumping in the air and wishing for it at the high point of my jump. Only the mechanism was finicky about it being the exact high point so I usually had to jump multiple times, and I had my bad knees. The bases were were it got all SMG/MLP. It's hard to explain how. They were all just floating in space and populated by things like the luma things from SMG, but they were individuated more like the ponies in MLP.

Also, the adorable cartoon vashta nerada kept eating everyone in whatever base I left the ones I'd convinced to allow me to re-home.

Plans For Today

The biggest thing in terms of what you all will immediately see is posting chapter 7, but that's not much in the way of work. It's just a matter of waking up sufficiently to handle prose without breaking it. After that, I'm going to be putting together the newsletter from drafts and fragments. Those of you who are signed up for it should receive the first issue this afternoon/evening.

On a more "meta" level, getting the newsletter out is part of is one step in my next big task for myself.

I've got a handle on the writing thing. I've figured out how to approach it, how to handle it as part of my work day... how to set an obligation and meet it. I did this in part by separating it out from other (non-writing) work tasks. Now I need to similarly find a way to meet my other obligations. I have things I need to get mailed out. Lists I need to update. Things like that. Anxiety was one of the major obstacles in getting my writing on the consistent track it's on now. It's also the main obstacle here. The techniques I've learned for dealing with anxiety before I start writing will help a bit in the initial approach, but I need to do what I did with writing, which is basically throw out a lot of preconceptions about how I work or how things are supposed to be and find out what actually works for me.