alexandraerin

News For Today

Well, the fundraiser's started to really take off in earnest. One of my tasks for tomorrow (formerly a task for yesterday) is to re-write the fundraiser post so that it's more concise and bullet-pointy. I'll make a blog post that explains things in greater detail.

The Gift of the Bad Guy has officially broken even. The money I sunk into producing it has been made back. Next week's "technical day" I will be working on getting it onto Amazon and Smashwords, which should help boost the income quite a bit.

And in a final bit of news, I'm posting this on Dreamwidth. I have it set up so it should cross-post to Livejournal automatically. If you follow me on Livejournal, know that I have no plans to abandon LJ at the moment. But given the level of their troubles and the extent to which I rely on my blog as a productivity and communication tool, a backup is in order.

Personal Assessment

I have both less pain and a greater degree of mobility in my arm. It doesn't seem like it's going to interfere with computering today.

I slept okay.

I'm feeling fine, mentally.

Dreams From Last Night

I was running a D&D game at the Colonial in Memphis. No special guest appearances. Flabberghast really was the combobreaker, I guess.

Plans For Today

I'm going to go throw a flash up at Fantasy in Miniature, then my one task for the day is writing the next chapter of Tales of MU. Giving over an eight hour work day to it worked out so well and felt so good on Monday. This is Friday's chapter, so if I finish it today it won't go up immediately, but I won't be waiting until Friday night in that case.

What, this is still sitting in my browser? Dang, I thought I posted this already. Guess I'm still a little spacey.

News For Today

My plans continue to take shape. I've decided to slow down the pace of going over old chapters of Tales of MU. I had planned on doing four or five a day for the purely arbitrary reason that it would let me get the first book done (and ready to go on Amazon and Smashwords) in about one working week. I can do that many in a day but I think a little more attention to detail is warranted. I'm going to set it at two chapters a day. I'll do more if I'm on a roll.

I think this willingness to adjust my plans rather than let them fall apart when reality diverges from expectations is a sign of maturation. I'm taking into account the possibility of a need for adjustment when I consider how exactly to run the monthly back-up feature, which is an idea that excites me more the more I think about it.

My brain keeps developing Untitled Fantasy Novel during the down cycles, which is good because I'm not sure it had even a modestly-sized book's worth of plot in the original storyline. I'm calling it a novel but it's more of a mosaic or tapestry story. It's going to end up being a very "meta" story in some ways, one of those stories that's about stories. That will probably only increase the resemblance that prompted Jack to remark "Reading a lot of Pratchett lately, love?" after reading the first chapter, but let's face it... there are worse influences one could show.

It's not a MUniverse story, but it's part of what might be termed the MUltiverse... within walking distance, we might say. I've put so much work into the worldbuilding of MU that it seems silly not to make use of it, to re-engineer the wheel again when it comes to populating a world with elves, dwarves, gnomes, ogres, and the like. Those who wish TOMU were more of a traditional fantasy adventure story might be more satisfied with UFN... or I don't know, they might simply continue to be disappointed that TOMU isn't what they want it to be.

Personal Assessment

So, I got not quite six hours of sleep last night. Kind of disappointing, considering how genuinely sleepy I was when I went to lie down. But I feel okay, so maybe it's all I needed? I don't know.

Random Links

Catherynne Valente's announcement of Deathless's availability, accompanied by an awesome picture by Seanan McGuire.

Also, I give to you the greatest Twitter hashtag ever.

Plans For Today

Today is workday 1A: work on final chapter of volume 1, write a couple of FIMs.

Full task list:

• Get major structure of TOMU chapter in place.
  
• Write some FIMs. At least one's going to be another piece of Later Days, which my brain is also shaping on the down cycles.
  
• Answer emails - got a few of these.
  
• Fulfill order(s) for The Gift of the Bad Guy.
  
• Go over next two chapters of old TOMU.
  

So at least Friday doesn't feel like Monday this week? It's interesting to me how my idea of what day it is always gets worst at the end of the week. It's like the weekend resets my calibration, but it starts drifting as soon as the week starts.

News For Today

Six AAEs sold. The previews had two errors (so far, though they may be the extent of it) that made it through proofreading and one error in the Sans copy that I induced myself with an incautious edit after proofreading. I arranged the proofing a little late in the game for the preview; there will be time for more scrutiny on the finished product. I'm not overly concerned... despite any unwise claims an industry partisan might make to the contrary, one does find errors in professionally edited and traditionally published manuscripts, and an e-document is easy enough to amend and re-issue.

I was wise enough experienced enough at messing this sort of thing up to have procedures for record-keeping and easy, brain-fog-proof fulfillment in place before I started doing this. All the AAE purchasers have been sent an email confirmation with their number and the details of the order to ensure that the name and such are correct. This information is also in a spreadsheet that lists them all in order. When the book is assembled in its final form I can go down the list and prepare an email to each one with the attachment(s), to go out when the book is launched.

I haven't sent separate confirmations to the people who pre-bought the standard edition... my thought is that PayPal's email notifications should be sufficient proof of order when there are no personal details. Right now there are only a few and they've each elected to pay more than the minimum, but I don't want to start a precedent based on that and then have five hundred 75 cent orders that need to be addressed. Before my next LitSnacks project... probably before this one launches... I'm going to have a more efficient email solution in place. I'm not exactly doing everything by hand, but there are things that can be automated.

I'm learning as I'm doing things here... I put a lot of planning into this project, but one part of that plan was "Keep an open mind and open eyes for ways that I could do something better next time, because there are things that won't become apparent until I'm actually in the thick of it."

Interesting sidenote from my spreadsheeting... because I'm tracking the gross and net on my sales, I can see that as of right now I'm keeping 93% of the money that's spent on these books. That number might trend upwards towards 94% if most of the purchasers are in the U.S. and buying the AAE or down towards 90% as more people buy the standard copy, but either way it's a darn good rate.

Personal Assessment

Doin' okay. Slept more than four hours. Looking forward to some sunny weather next week.

Dreams From Last Night

Indistinct.

Random Link

Kickstarter is a site that's pretty much all about the crowdfunding. I've seen a couple of projects (a roleplaying game book and a music album, if I recall correctly) being financed through them. It allows for "all-or-nothing funding", where a goal must be reached in order for transactions to be completed, so you can get all the money needed to start a big project (or even one that's not huge but too big for you to do on your own) but nobody loses out if it doesn't come together.

As an example of a Kickstarted project, here's a refillable bamboo notebook project... Jack sent me a link to this yesterday and while I don't remember what his total was I seem to recall thinking that the poor guy had quite a ways to go and was nearing his deadline, but now I check it today and he's over the top. This is clearly a guy with a business plan and the skills needed to pull it off, which has to help.

Maybe when it's time to do print editions of collected LitSnacks or Tales of MU, I'll use Kickstarter to raise funds to get things like proper, professional designs and a print run that brings the price down. It would be easy enough to build a pre-order into it, as this gentleman has done with his rewards.

Plans For Today

I've got a pretty important chapter of Tales of MU to write, so that's job one... Wednesday's update would still be a treat, I'm sure, given that it saved people waiting four days to resolve the tension from the previous chapters, but I doubt the folks whose Amazon subscriptions earned it would feel properly rewarded if I kept everyone waiting five days for the resolution to that chapter.

I'm also keeping an eye out for any more feedback on the initial version of the preview downloads and will be filing any more orders that come in while I'm working. Jack is off on a fun little get-away this weekend and my housemate will be going to work in about an hour so I've got a nice, big chunk of time to myself this evening in which I can sit down and get things done.

News For Today:

Today's news, like the bit about being on Kindle (P.S.: Fantasy In Miniature is up there, too, now, though I'm not going to push it until it's had some regular updates again.), is something to be filed under stuff I should have gotten on top of sooner but didn't really know about.

My plans for The Gift of the Bad Guy involve selling the e-book for about a dollar. Lulu.com is no longer a viable solutions for one dollar e-books, as they charge a 99 cents base price for them and tell you with a straight face that this is to pay for bandwidth and such. Maybe the price of such has shot up a lot in the past few years, but bandwidth just doesn't cost that much. When I learned that, I Googled micropayments and microtransactions to find out who could give me a transaction fee rate that wouldn't eat as much of $1 as PayPal does (which was like $0.33).

And I learned that PayPal will give me such a rate.

I'd seen people mention PayPal's micropayments option before, but when I went looking for it in their back end I couldn't find it. I figured I'd just misunderstood and they were talking about the fact that you can take micropayments with PayPal. Well, it turns out that they do have a separate micropayments option, but the reason I couldn't find it is it isn't even there. You have to go to a separate site (note: this site doesn't work with some browsers, such as Chrome and reportedly Safari) and ask for them to switch your account over. It takes up to two business days for approval. I sent my request over the weekend and found a positive reply waiting for me this afternoon when I woke up.

What does switching my account to micropayments do? It makes every transaction I receive in U.S. dollars from a person in the U.S. cost me a flat $0.05 + 5%. International rates vary the base fee but have the same basic idea of making small transactions affordable. This means on very large transactions I will pay a few dollars more than I would have if I hadn't switched... like a $300 transaction will cost about $4 more in fees... but for every transaction not over $12 or so, I'll be making more money.

Like a dollar transaction. Instead of taking home 67 cents every time someone sends me a dollar, I'll be pocketing 90 cents. And everybody who buys a one dollar e-book for me, I'll be getting the equivalent of a 90 percent royalty. As the size of the transaction increases, the advantage over the regular rate decreases, but the percentage I'm paying out from the occasional large transaction is going to be way outweighed by the savings on all the little ones.

This is big news. My income--both potential from the e-books and actual money I'm making now--just went up today.

Other people doing the crowdfunding dance on your own websites: if you don't know about this already, get in on it.

Other news:

• My housemate got herself a Sony e-reader yesterday, so I've got another platform to test e-book formats out on.
  
• I'm officially setting the release date of The Gift of the Bad Guy, which is book one of the Gifters Saga, for March 14th. That's later than I intended to, but I want to take the time to get this right as it's my first one. It will give me time to solicit feedback on the formatting (after the free sample goes up) and make adjustments based on it.
  

Personal Assessment

I slept a lot, and am pleased to find myself feeling pretty normal today... not groggy and dead to the world, but also not so crackling with energy that I couldn't sit still or sleep.

Dreams From Last Night

I was barefoot in a park after a rainstorm, at a picnic/cookout with my family. My mother couldn't believe I was barefoot and kept asking me if bugs weren't biting my feet, which they were, but only when she asked about them. A bunch of people (including me) had devices that were very clearly electronic books but which were supposed to be new MP3 players in the dream. After I got tired of being bitten by bugs, I went home, which was just up the street. Neither the street nor the house was actually familiar to me. It was like one of those single-developer neighborhoods where all the houses are built from stock plans. Once home, I danced around the kitchen to music from my Kindle iPod until my mother came home and told me she was glad her children were there.

Tasks For Today

• Write a flash story.
  
• Do some more character tags for Tales of MU.
  
• Work on the next chapter of Tales of MU.
  
• Apparently spend over an hour of my own time compiling and formatting a post that lists all the nominees for the Rose And Bay awards, links to their works, and links to the individual voting posts because it didn't occur to anyone to do this before for some reason?
  

Item removed: big dent in last TGotBG chapter. Got bogged down in other things. Productive day, still.

News For Today

Business

I've been re-reading the MU archives, something I'm going to continue doing here. The leap forward when the volume changes is going to have the advantage of letting me drop some things that might otherwise turn into small continuity hiccups, but other ones that already exist will need to be ironed out before I collect the mass of uncategorized chapters into literal books.

I'm mostly talking about the minorest of plot points; things like a teacher mentioning something for one class and then something different happening in the next one. Those are the sorts of things most apt to fall into the dead zone in my brain, it seems. I'm pretty good with keeping track of events and conversations that I've written, but anything like a schedule of events I'm no better at keeping straight in fiction than I am in real life, so that's something I'll be watching out for in the new volume.

I've contacted the people who ordered diplomas and didn't receive them, and have made arrangements to make good on their orders. Those diplomas and the one that's been ordered since then (and any others ordered in the next two days) will be made Wednesday and probably put in Thursday's mail. As part of easing my process there, I've decided to make Wednesday my regular day for handling that sort of thing, as the middle of the week is when I seem most apt to need a break from writing.

The people who are waiting on story prints from Fantasy In Miniature will be contacted then, too.

Personal

My housemate's kind of having a rough time of it, health-wise and technology-working-wise. We've set up the mostly disused office as an actual office... there was a long gestating, never materializing plan for someone to be living there or else it might have happened sooner. I'm probably not going to be working out of there specifically... I've found that being able to move around at whim is much more conducive to the bulk of my work, the creative part. But it will give me an easier place to do the mailing and clerical parts of my work, as I have a computer in there and there are flat surfaces and the dining room table's just outside the door and the house printer's on the same floor.

Mostly, though, the "office" is the gaming room. I feel a lot more comfortable installing distracting and addicting computer games when they're on a different floor/the opposite end of the house from where I usually work and sleep. It's not that I have no willpower... it's that I have no willpower and a non-existent sense of the passage of time.

Personal Assessment

Fine. I slipped on some slippery snow while getting out of a car yesterday and slammed my upper arm into the frame of the car. I was concerned about it because it's the arm that's attached by my weak shoulder (dislocated during a fall on the ice about 10 years ago), so I made a note to watch for developing problems. But the pain faded before I even got home and I don't feel anything today.

My knees are good enough that I have to keep reminding myself not to do things like sit with my legs folded. On bad days they do that for me.

It occurs to me that when I turned thirty I was still wondering when I was going to stop mentally classing myself as a "kid", when it would no longer take me a moment to realize references to the youth of today or teenagers or college-aged folk or so on weren't talking about me. The recurring joint pain appears to have done the trick. Thanks, body.

Today feels like it's going to be a moderately fuzzy/foggy brain. We'll see how it goes.

Update: Pretty painful cramp in my leg. Been a while since I've had one of these.

Dreams From Last Night

Confusing jumble of Borderlands and Justice League. Not surprising, considering that I fell asleep contemplating Borderlands, which was just installed in the office, and DCUO, which will be tomorrow.

Random Link For The Day

None.

642 Things To Draw, via pretzelcoatl.

I need to start a list of site addresses that I see and think "I should throw a link to this up somewhere. No, wait, I'll make it the random link of the day." That's why I started adding this on here.

Plans For Today

Write a chapter of MU, then read more of the archive.

In light of the neural weather forecast, it might be shorter than they've been lately, or up after midnight, but I'm confident of my ability to get one done. While the archive trawl is important for multiple reasons (reconnecting with the work on an emotional level is as important, if not more so, than smoothing out continuity), today is sort of highlighting the importance of getting the schedule padding in place. While I'm golden for the rest of the week, if I had a bad day on Monday, I'd be behind. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but it wouldn't be awesome, either.

Today's News

Main item: the D&D thing. Some of the players have told me that they're not going to be available, other people have spotty availability to begin with, and basically things are otherwise going so well right now that I don't the responsibility or stress. So, sorry, but I'm calling time of death on this one. I'll run more D&D when I can figure out how to do it in a way that's actually fun for me.

Personal Assessment

Feeling pretty good. I've already fielded a couple of complaints from my knees about how not to sit, but they're definitely doing better.

Yesterday I caught myself chugging a Pepsi, which is usually a sign that I'm not drinking enough water. I put it down and got a glass of water, but I need to remember to drink more today.

Dreams From Last Night

None that I can recall. Get with the program, subconscious. You're embarrassing me.

Random Link For The Day

After 5,251,143,942,866 days of pious observation, the angel who watches over small furry things reports that cats remain outstanding:


Plans For Today

Write a chapter. This'll be the chapter for Friday. If I finish it and have another decent day tomorrow, I'll be starting next week ahead of the game.

And if I don't? I'll still be able to get a chapter up tomorrow and I'll be starting next week neither ahead nor behind.

News For Today

This isn't personal news, but looks like Borders is in some trouble. If you got gift cards for Christmas, you should probably look into spending them soon... if they declare bankruptcy, the cards could be voided. And if they go out of business entirely, then obviously you won't have anywhere to spend them.

I'll be making a post soon about the upcoming MU relaunch so people know what to expect... I'm leery of both underselling and overselling people on the magnitude of the change. On the one hand I don't want people to be taken by surprise by it, but on the other... well, there are people reading who apparently can't stand any of the characters and are dissatisfied with my every creative choice.

I just want everyone to know that no matter how much the characters or I change and grow, they're still going to be them and I'm still going to be me. If you're worried about the change, take that as reassurance. If you hate the story but you're hanging around because you're sure if you focus your will strongly enough you can force it to become something you want to read out of sheer determination, then I really hope you find something better to do with your time. I've made no bones about the fact that I'm not writing a story for everyone.

Personal Assessment

My knees are a mess. My sleep schedule is a little off because of New Years. The chapter that goes up today may be following a somewhat flexible definition of "today"; i.e., before I go to sleep again.

Dreams From Last Night

I was traveling around the western hemisphere, within a video game that seemed to combine elements of the "Cruisin'" series and Burnout Paradise. The whole of the contiguous Americas was an open sandbox of roads, with only five real cities, in the center of Canada, the United States, Mexico, Panama, and Brazil. (The U.S. one was a mash-up of New York and L.A., despite being located in Kansas.) Each city contained an airport, which could be used to travel instantly to any of the other cities, a hotel, and a Wal-Mart-like store that had only very slightly different selection than the other cities.

Interestingly, it seemed to me like I was actually traveling, even though the medium was clearly a video game.

Random Link For The Day

Optipess, a surreal webcomic. I'd call it "darkly humorous" but part of its charm is how lighthearted it manages to seem no matter the subject matter... fitting, given that its name is supposed to be a mash-up of "optimism" and "pessimism".

Plans For Today

Get a chapter written. I'd wanted to have a longer task list for today, but I just got up a little bit ago and I've found that when I say something will be done on a certain day, the most vocal response comes from the people who are most pedantic about the definition of "day"... i.e., the loudest ones are the ones who start grumbling when it's not done before that night, and I'm declared a lazy layabout and failure as a human being if it's not posted before 12:00 a.m.

Part of my ongoing personal journey is to stop giving people like that any purchase inside my skull. As this newly reinvigorated production schedule continues, I'm going to build up some schedule padding and also make a permanent notice that when I say something will be up "Monday", it means "before my day begins on Tuesday", and after that people who want to gripe about it will be referred to the office of Mr. Bender Bending Rodriguez and his shiny metal ass. But for now, I'm just not in the mood to deal with it. I said there will be a chapter Monday, so I'm just writing a chapter and will post it before midnight tonight.

News For Today

Um, I guess see post below, on the personal front.

Yesterday was a "bad brain day". Not only could I not focus enough to pull together a story, it didn't even occur to me to use my headphones to block out distractions... the headphones that I basically haven't shut up about or stopped using since I got them. Not that they helped. But this is okay. I have the expectation that Such Days Will Happen built into my plans. It's why I saved the story I wrote Tuesday for Wednesday and said the story I planned on writing on Wednesday would go up Friday, instead of getting all cocky and saying "Hey, I'm totally writing a chapter every day."

Personal Assessment

Sleep came late and was interrupted by fucking birds and/or squirrels on the roof (an analysis made after I was more awake made acrobatic squirrels seem more likely, but I'm fairly sure I heard bird noises). But I did sleep.

Dreams From Last Night

Whatever I dreamed during the night part of last night was lost when I woke up and fell asleep again. Something about traveling across the (modern) country via coach. But after the interruption happened, I fell back asleep and dreamed that the noises on the roof were actually workers patching the roof.

Random Link For The Day

Muppets With People Eyes. (Courtesy of pretzelcoatl.)

If that's not terrifying enough by itself, remember: Elmo knows where you live.

Plans For Today

Write a chapter, if I'm fully recovered from yesterday's brain-fog (I just wrote "today's brain-fog" on my first try... not necessarily a terrible omen, since I did just wake up), or get a good start on a chapter that I can finish tomorrow if not. Either way my goal of a chapter on Friday is pretty low-hanging fruit, which is kind of amazing that this week has had a bad brain day, interrupted sleep, and dealing with emotional problems.

Next week you're going to see the return of the old-fashioned task list (gosh dang it, I just typed "return of the low-hanging fruit"... I need to take my pills and then go stand under running water when this is done, or something... and maybe start doing that before writing my status posts. Although if I didn't catch the mistakes as I made them it could be more entertaining this way) in this space.) as I have a better idea how much of my workday to devote to putting together a chapter of Tales of MU and I start allocating the rest of my time.