The Daily Report
Well, my end-of-month push for August yielded mixed results. I did start (and mostly finish, more on that a paragraph down) a new piece with which I’m very happy, and which I will finish today and post as a slightly belated short story for August. But a pair of (still ongoing) family health situations did impact things.
After I made the decision (mentioned earlier this week) to basically take a fail on August, I have decided that the centerpiece of my Patreon and my planned “year of awesome” really must stand: one short story a month for a year. I think that’s the central value I’m offering. This is why rather than just saying August was a miss and taking the thing I started writing earlier this week and using it to get a headstart on September, I’m going to finish it and post it.
Now, I’m calling it a short story, but I had to some soul-searching regarding categorization. What it is, in fact, is an epic science fiction poem. I’m calling it a short story because it is short story length (it’s going to wind up between 3,000 and 4,000 words, when I’ve shored up a few passages that need shoring up) and because it does, in fact, tell a story in a distinctly linear fashion. Poetry is the form, but it is a short story.
I had some moments of going back and forth with myself about whether or not this “counted”. It already felt a bit like I was just giving myself wiggle room when I made one of my monthly goals “a flash fiction or poem”, as if I’m treating those interchangeably when they’re different things. And they are, but so are two different pieces of fiction, or two different poems.
The poem is (currently) called “Our World Is A Lifeboat”. It’s a science fiction poem that, in practical terms, is about the survivors of a crashed space ship, at least in the way that Asimov wrote stories that were about robots.
Financial Status
Awkward. Much improved from before the summer, though tight because of WorldCon, because a “nominal fee” we had planned for wound up being a couple hundred more than we’d anticipated, and because my dismal performance in the August heat means Tales of MU made me very little money, which is fair, I’m not complaining. The whole point of the model I’m using for that is that people only pay to support it when it’s being update. But it’s a fact that my income at the start of this month looks a lot more like my income back in March or April than the rest of the summer, and that’s a problem.
I have been enjoying increasing celebrity and acclaim, but the real long and short of it all is that I need this to translate into Patreon growth, and that’s not happening. I keep churning along just below the $400 mark, which has been my goal pretty much since I started, and even that is just an initial goal. I need to be making more money.
It might be that I need to cut back on how much of my time, energy, and creative output is given away for free. As much as I hew to the model of the “the foundation of crowdfunding is the crowd”, I need a better way to get the crowd to bring the funds. Do I start my entertaining and/or insightful digressions off Twitter and put them directly on my Patreon page? Start locking down my short stories, posting only the beginnings?
I have to do something different. I need to figure out what it is. Heat or no heat, con or no con, I think I would have had an easier time sustaining my momentum through August if the numbers had been growing the way I had thought/expected/hoped they would.
The State of the Me
Doing pretty good? Late night hospital visits leading to late night dining out instead of cooking at home has played havoc with my eating and sleeping habits; my choices for drinks the past two nights have pretty much been something with caffeine at 10 or 11 at night, something with sugar, or ice water. I might have to get back in the habit of carrying flavor drops in my bag. For all that I’ve been overcaffeinated the past two nights, I have slept okay… not deeply, but deeply enough. Thank goodness for high tolerance.
Plans For Today
I’m going to be finishing up my epic poem and posting it in some form, but also doing a lot of stocktaking and figuring out where I go from here.