The Daily Report

Well, day 2 out of 5 for the week and I’m checking off one of my minor goal action items already by doing a status post immediately. Look at me go! To give you an idea how out of it I was early yesterday, I actually started my status post right about now and then couldn’t focus to enough to finish it until late afternoon. A lot clearer today.

This means I’m more likely to make progress on my bigger goals today.

Financial Status

Basically unchanged. Not comfortable, not desperate, not where I need to be. Growing slowly.

The State of the Me

Not bad, getting better.

Plans For Today

It’s going to be a busy day. Grocery shopping (you can help kick into our household expenses here, or using http://www.paypal.me/alexandraerin), writing, coding, revising submission guidelines for Ligature Works. Tales of MU coming up tonight.

The Daily Report

I’m setting myself three major “accomplishment” goals for this week.

1. Get back on track, re: having Tales of MU updates done and posted for MU Patreon subscribers a day in advance of their general publishing. It’s not going to happen for Tuesday’s chapter, but I want to be ahead of the game before Friday.
2. Have a major update for RealmLike available on Wednesday.
3. Open Ligature Works for a ~6-week submission window, starting on Friday the 15th.

Smaller goals:

1. Write fiction/poetry every day for a minimum of one hour, preferably two or more. Note: This is actual “hands on keyboard” time. Actual time directly spent in the entire creative process is about double that.
2. Write a status post every day. It’s just a good habit and helps keep me on track.
3. Post more often to my author Patreon, so people have a better idea what I’m doing. A lot of times I’ll do something small or incidental and throw it up on Twitter or Tumblr, and not link to it there. Bad habit, no biscuit.

Financial Status

Pulling back the curtain a little bit here –

One reason I’m getting fired up about writing MU in advance is that I’d really like to attract more patrons there. If I were in fact earning the $66 per chapter that is listed on the page, I’d be in really good shape right now. I mean, I’d still want to build on that. But that’s a livable rate for the work involved.

The problem is that it doesn’t reflect the per-month cap that a lot of patrons have on their contributions. And to be very clear: the problem isn’t that people have such caps. If you’ve got X dollars a month you can spend on Tales of MU, I’d rather you do so than feel bad that you don’t have X+Y  dollars. I cannot stress this enough. I don’t care if someone caps their contribution at $1 a month. If everybody reading MU who were able to do that, did that, I’d be overwhelmed. No amount of patronage is ever insulting or inconvenient. None.

But Patreon’s reported payout-per-chapter is based on all pledges, before caps, which makes it hard for me to do financial planning and maybe gives people an inflated notion of how much money I’m making. When I hit all my chapters for the month, it’s honestly more like $20 or $30 per chapter, averaged out over the month. I’m getting $60 some for the first chapter, more like $15 for the last one. Which, again, I appreciate. But it does a lot less for my motivation to know that each chapter I post in a given month is worth slightly less than the previous one.

I try to think of it in terms of yes, but it’s still more money overall. Because, yes, it’s still more money overall. And it’s always going to be true that each chapter brings diminishing returns, because caps. But ultimately, I think it’ll be easier to keep writing as the returns fall if the overall payouts are increasing, even if a lot of the new patrons are capping their pledges at $1, $3, or $5 a month.

And even with these complications, I do still think the “per chapter” model is better for Tales of MU than the “per month” model, in terms of fairness to readers and motivation/accountability for me. Crowdfunding a specific work of art works best when the funds are tied to the production thereof, in my opinion and experience.

All of this is to say that if you enjoy Tales of MU, you can do a lot for it and for me by pledging a dollar or more per chapter, with or without a cap on charges in a given month. If we get to the point where I actually am making $50, $60, $70 a chapter on average, that’s going to do a lot to keep the show on the road, so to speak.

The State of the Me

Very slow start to today. I had trouble sleeping most of the weekend, and then got my flu shot on Sunday. I am in an elevated risk group and I have close family members who have even more risk factors, so I always get my shot as soon as I can and I always get the quadrivalent shot when it’s available. Historically, I tend to get joint aches, muscle soreness, and heightened fatigue after a flu shot, and this time was no different.

Plans For Today

I’ve already done some blogging and tweeting, and made and posted a custom D&D monster. I’m about to start my hour of writing.

DAILY REPORT

Well, it’s another month. September was a bit unfocused for me. Financial stress and anxiety over the election had me running from the internet a lot, which resulted in a lot of writing and a lot of game development, but not a lot of time communicating what I was doing or collating/publishing it. I did have some writing breakthroughs that I think are going to lead to good places, particularly with regards to my plans to re-establish myself as one of the most prolific authors on the web over the course of this year. As of the second half of September, I was very close to my goal of writing every day for set intervals. This month, I’m going to nail that goal, and share the fruits of it with you.

Unfocused though it was, September did end on a few high notes.

We published the first issue of Ligature Works, on time and as advertised. There were a couple technical speedbumps at the end, but we learned a lot about how to avoid them.

I have my first patron at the “writing class” perk level. I’ve long thought that once I can get someone in the door there and demonstrate the value of it, I’ll have an easier time attracting more customers.

And RealmLike is my most successful game dev project in more than ten years, both in terms of the interest it’s been attracting and how it’s coming together. The server to play it is offline right now but it will be back up later today.  I think RealmLike could be a nice supplementary revenue stream down the line, but I’ll have to connect with the right audience and refine it into a product worth selling first.

FINANCIAL STATUS

Still in a hole due to WorldCon cost overruns/expense underestimations. Any immediate help appreciated: http://www.paypal.me/alexandraerin or https://cash.me/$AlexandraErin.

STATE OF THE ME

Very tired today, very slow start to my day.  Otherwise good.

PLANS FOR TODAY

Have to run out to pay for a grocery trip at some point in the afternoon. Our household finances are *almost* at the point where this won’t be necessary anymore, really looking forward to that. Depending on when that happens or how it goes, I will either be writing tomorrow’s Tales of MU chapter or doing some random writing in the afternoon, possibly both.

The Daily Report

Well, I’ve spent way more time this week on RealmLike than I had expected to, due to a confluence of two factors: some very promising nibbles of interest my first announcements received, and some interface-breaking/compatibility-impairing bugs with the BYOND engine that runs it that threatened to inhibit that interest. BYOND’s lead developer is very responsive, though, and has been working to clear up those bugs. The browser-embedded version of the game is already leaps and bounds better than it was, and I am confident it will soon be fully functional in every way.

Before we got to that point, I spent (wasted) a lot of times assuming that the bugs were just gaps in my own understanding and trying to fix them on my own. Having the bugs I report verified and fixed is doing a lot to restore my confidence in my programming skills, and the game is shaping up into something I’m proud of. There aren’t enough people playing at a time yet for the social aspects of a MUD to start to crop up, but it really does scratch the retro dungeon-crawler itch that occasionally causes me to fire up a DOS emulator so I can play Nethack or DND.exe.

Absent spending whole days wrestling with a thing that should work but isn’t, I expect the game to progress by leaps and bounds even with just a couple hours a day devoted to it. BYOND’s programming language is easy, I’ve made the game’s basic system fairly extensible. I already extended the Cleric, the third one of the four core classes out to level 5, leaving only the Wizard as a sort of skeletal outline to be filled in.

The dungeon itself gained a bunch of features to make it less of a non-descript maze; some doorways now have doors. Random debris can litter the hallways. Statues appear in certain places. Most of it is just set-dressing, but it does help you figure out when you’re going around in circles. Now there are landmarks. Along the same lines, each level of the dungeon has a randomly assigned brick color to help you tell them apart, and the dungeon is physically lighter in the region around the up exit and darker around the down one.

In non-RealmLike news: even with the setbacks of the previous weeks, Ligature Works is still on track to publish its first issue next Friday, September 30th. I’d like to make a post announcing our table of contents/contributors, once I’m back at my desktop and can make sure I’m getting everybody’s bylines exactly right. And my Word hack of making a document template that is more comfortable for me to write in is yielding interesting dividends, writing-wise. More on that later.

Financial Status

Mostly unchanged. My attempts earlier in the month to do some ad hoc “reminder I need money to live” crowdfunding went mostly nowhere, but I am sanguine. If RealmLike’s browser interface can be made fully functional, it could well become another ongoing revenue stream. Again, there have been only a few intrepid playtesters so far, but once the browser issues are resolved I think it will easily grow some legs.

The State of the Me

Physically pretty great. Mentally a little more absentminded than I like to be. Usually when I’m as forgetful as I have been the past few days, it corresponds to high levels of cognitive fog. I have been clearheaded, but scatterbrained.

Plans For Today

Well, I have a domain for RealmLike, so I’m in the process of setting up a blog there so I have a central place to post updates without flooding this one. I’m going to be doing Tales of MU, and probably that Ligature Works post.

The Daily Report

Well, it took me three tries to get the date right in the title of this post. I got whammied over the weekend with a respiratory illness that I’m pretty sure I picked up hanging around the hospital, and came out of the fog enough to just barely get the chapter for yesterday in under the wire. Heck, I just typed “for tomorrow” twice trying to write that sentence. I think I’m physically fine now, but a couple quarts under on my sleep schedule and that’s leaving me a bit loopy.

On the subject of brain stuff, I discovered a weird hack for my own brain by accident. I was designing a document in Word that was meant to have a sort of retro look, so I turned the page color to black, the text color to white, and the font to a big fixed width one. Immediately I felt 200% more comfortable looking at and writing in Word.

I’ve long had this strong preference for old-style interfaces when I’m writing, probably because of the computers I grew up with, learned to type on, and learned to write with. It’s part of why I like ILYS and JDarkroom, even apart from their productivity flow-encouraging features. It’s just calming.

Word is the opposite of calming, when it comes to creative writing. I love it for structuring documents. I like its interface and its (now!) reliable autosaving across multiple platforms. But actually writing fiction in it has been a hurdle I haven’t been able to pass in a long time.

With this tweak to its presentation, though, I sat down and immediately wrote 800 words in 20 minutes, and a whole chapter in 90 minutes. It’s pretty great. The one downside is that I can’t figure out how to make a document from a custom template in Word 2016. I can save a blank black page as a template file, but I can’t see how to select it when I go to make a new document. Opening it and then saving it as my new document works, but less fluidly than I’d like. For this to really be handy, I need to be able to just open and go. If I can set it as my default template in Word, I’ll be golden.

…that just gave me the brainwave to search for “set default template” and “change default template”. I did, and the first results were from Microsoft… for Mac 2011 versions of Office. Nice. Scrolling down, though, I think I have figured out that I need to save my template to the right folder, and that opening and saving the “Normal” template will make changes to it. Something to try when I’m a little more clear-headed.

Financial Status

Not great. My ad-hoc fundraising efforts last week didn’t net much, so we’re still in the hole a bit. Writing Tales of MU again should help, but only at the end of the month. On that note, I noticed finally yesterday that when I changed my tip jar links on Tales of MU, I got the PayPal link wrong. Oops.

The State of the Me

See above.

Plans For Today

I’d hoped to make some more progress on my backlogged to-do list, but my attempts to-actually-do things keep running into absent-minded errors of the sort that make me suspect I should spend the remainder of the afternoon on more light creative things, where I can have “happy little accidents”.

The Daily Report

Well, the hospital situation is over for now. Our family member was actually released Wednesday, which was a profound relief for all of us. My initial plan for yesterday had been to jump back into things with both feet, but the week+ of exhaustion caught up to me and I spent most of the day asleep or napping. I think I might have caught a respiratory bug from hanging out in the hospital, as I have a sore and cruddy throat and an ache in my limbs. We’ll have to see how that develops.

Financial Status

Well, my attempts at ad hoc fall fundraising have brought in a little, but I’ve had more luck beating the drum for Patreon. Topped $400/month and I would really like to build on that, as that’s where my future security lies.

The State of the Me

See above.

Plans For Today

I’m spending the day in light duty/wait-and-see mode. I’d rather go through the weekend well-rested and start next week firing on all pistons than prolong the period of fatigue and stress.

The Daily Report

The hospital situation is very likely to be resolved this week, if at the end of it. Because things are still up in the air, I’ll be restarting Tales of MU on its regular schedule next week. Until then, I’m going to be doing what writing I can, probably mostly short things and experimental things, and working on the first issue of Ligature Works.

Financial Status

I made enough money yesterday to pay my webhosting for the month, thank goodness. I still need more to pay my phone bill for the month. Any contributions appreciated. Anything past the phone bill will go towards repaying our overruns for WorldCon expenses, then building savings. If we get that much, a fraction of it will go towards expanding our first issue of Ligature Works. More details in yesterday’s post.

I also crossed an important milestone yesterday on Patreon: the big four-oh-oh. Next I work on the big five-oh-oh. Onward and upward.

The State of the Me

Been doing better these past two days. Part of that was taking a long nap in the afternoon, though.

Plans For Today

Playing around with formatting for Ligature Works, writing, figuring out where to go with this twitter writing thing.

The Daily Report

Tales of MU will probably resume on Friday, and then pick back up with its regular schedule. I can’t make promises; there is an ongoing external situation here that is going to take up an unpredictable amount of my time and energy. I would love to keep everyone posted but it’s really hard to gauge these things as they’re ongoing.

I have joined the site Curious Cat, a social sub-medium that I’ve seen a few people on Twitter using. It’s like a way of bringing a Tumblr-style “ask box” to Twitter, and I joined because (as I said at the time) I apparently don’t have enough regrets in my life? I don’t know. I actually joined it while waiting in the hospital looking for distraction, and I think that’s probably it’s main virtue. My profile there is up at http://curiouscat.me/alexandraerin.

I’d like to keep it light. Please do not use it for work-related inquiries. You can ask about my works (i.e., story or character questions). But anything about work, please direct to my official contact email address of blueauthor@alexandraerin.com.

If it gets weird, if it gets boundary-crossing, if it gets creepy, I might just shut it down.

Another thing I did while waiting to go to the hospital and then waiting there is write the horror story on Twitter that I referenced in my post earlier. I think this is something I’m going to do more of: write fiction directly on Twitter, for the Twitter market. I did actually start a writing account at one point when I realized how much Twitter’s format appeals to my writer-brain, but it didn’t go very far, I think because what I tried to do is use Twitter’s constraints to write a traditional novel. The Trump horror story is written within the constraints of Twitter, and it uses them. It’s closer to an oral storytelling tradition than a written one, which is not surprising since my general approach to Twitter is oratorical in style. I’m going to be experimenting more with that.

Financial Status

Well, I just launched a fundraiser for September with the specific goal of $1,000, and the more general goal of recouping some losses of the past couple months and repairing the lost padding. Hoping that takes off.

The State of the Me

Sleep schedule = way off. Nutritional and supplemental regimen = slightly off. The lingering remnants of my foot injuries (chafing and blisters) have been reasserting themselves since I’ve been putting shoes on and going out every day, something which has also been taking a fatigue toll given the lingering summer heat. I have been in a state of fog and befuddlement so far this morning.

Plans For Today

I’m going to be writing some of what I’m currently calling Hell To Pay: The Strange Facts of the Sad Case of Donald J. Trump, being the longer form version of my Twitter story. I don’t expect to finish that day, though I do expect to finish it soon. I am also planning on expanding another of my hospital-waiting-related Twitter threads into a longer form, an essay or prose poem of sorts called “We Made A Song Our King”.

The plain and simple facts:

• WorldCon was more expensive than I had budgeted for or foreseen, by several hundred dollars when all is said and done. I crowdfunded the budget I did have because our household in general and myself in particular did not have anywhere near the “wiggle room” to add another, even bigger convention to our schedule, so this left me in the hole.
• August was a light month for me, work-wise, because of complications relating to WorldCon, including aggravated fatigue and leg injuries that had me on my back after it. This cost me a couple of hundred dollars at least in direct income.
• One of my older family members is currently in the hospital, which takes time and energy, again affecting my ability to do my immediate paying work. (Tales of MU in particular suffers when my daily routine is not routine, and that’s just over a third of my Patreon income when it’s going according to plan.)

Before all this, I did have some financial padding. My goal with this fundraiser is to recoup those losses and start rebuilding that padding. I’m setting the goal at $1,000, which represents the additional costs plus the lost income plus a little bit extra to jump start savings.

I am currently supporting Ligature Works directly out of my own pocket, and this is not a complaint, mind you, because it was the plan. But as an incentive, I will say that 10% of contributions I get (up to my goal) will go towards expanding our first issue’s table of contents. That’s an additional piece we will purchase for every $250. If we go over $1,000, I’ll put aside a similar amount of the excess for future issues.

As a further incentive: yesterday: the story I wrote on Twitter yesterday about Trump’s infernal dealings backfiring is something I’m currently expanding into a longer, more traditional prose story, probably something of about novelette length. My plan is to release this as an ebook. If I hit my goal inside of a week, I will make that ebook free on Amazon and as a multiformat, DRM-free bundle on my own website for a period of no less than 24 hours.

You can contribute using either PayPal (address alexandra at alexandraerin dot com if PayPal.Me is not available in your country/region) or Square Cash.

And while direct cup-rattling, drum-beating, and general PBS-ing like this is just part of the crowdfunded life, ultimately I would really like to move past the point where it’s necessary. That means I need new blood on Patreon. While I enjoy performing for the crowd, this month already I’ve started releasing more works exclusively on Patreon, and this trend will continue. You can make sure you don’t miss anything and help me secure my present and future circumstances by joining me there.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your support.

The Daily Report 

Well, August is almost over. At several points before, during, and after WorldCon, I considered making a post explaining that it had been a difficult month (seasonal heat, plus scrambling for/being at/recovering from WorldCon) and that I’m basically giving myself a mulligan on it, but I never actually found the wherewithal to do so.

My plan to start my year of awesome was like most of my plans: spur of the moment and hatched in the spring, when days are getting longer and brighter but the summer heat hasn’t hatched. The timing meant that July and August were months 2 and 3 of my plan. This was such a terrible idea that it wasn’t even August before I decided that next year I’m officially scheduling and announcing light duty/sabbatical during those hottest two months, but I also felt like I needed to power through and do it anyway.

So here we are at the end of August and I have not clearly articulated my situations or intentions, and for that, I apologize. I am back in the saddle after a solid week off, post-con. I may yet cross a few more items off my to-do list in the next three days. But I may not hit all of my monthly writing goals for August.

I will certainly not hit my personal zine/newsletter goals, and in fact, it may be time to re-evaluate those because my initial vision is just not coming together at all. One theme that got hammered at the writerly panels I visited at WorldCon was something that I struggle with, even as an self-declared experimental writer and publisher: if something’s not working, stop doing it.

So I’m going to be re-evaluating that. Honestly, I think August might have gone better if I hadn’t spent so much time spinning my wheels on this and trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Anyway, I don’t want to dwell too long on what’s been going wrong when I have been having such an objectively awesome time.

Financial Status

A little strained. Our transportation and food costs for the con went over the few hundred dollars I had allotted from the fundraiser; something I definitely saw coming but was too stressed to really do anything about. Our generally improved and improving financial outlooks gave us some padding to eat into, but the padding’s awfully thin and needs replacing, and we need to buy groceries in the meantime. If you’ve enjoyed my (Alfie Award-winning!) writing and commentary over the years, now’s a good time to chip in through PayPal or Square Cash.

The State of the Me

Navigating the convention and traveling left me with a lot of phsyical problems that exacerbate my fatigue (heat exhaustion, dehydration, borked sleep schedule and nutritional regimen, etc.), as well as some genuine injuries to my feet and lower legs, the least of which were blisters on each heel right at the tendon. After a solid week of rest, including a day and a half of actual bed rest, the still painful remnants of the blisters are all that remains of these issues.

Plans For Today

Back to work day. I’m basically going to open up a window and start writing whatever wants to be written. Even if I’m taking a pass on my goals for the month, I’m still going to try to fulfill as much of them as I can, ending this month well in order to start the next one with a head of steam.