The Daily Report

So, first thing: a close family member is in the hospital with a painful but not likely life-threatening condition. Any predictions about the trajectory of this day must be somewhat guarded. The fact that I do not drive means I’m the least likely to be called on to help in times like this, but I must be prepared nonetheless. That said, my goal for the day is to still keep things normal as possible.

Another submission for Ligature Works has arrived. So far it’s heavily slanted towards prose, which is sort of the opposite of what I’d expected. It was kind of a bare afterthought that I made the venue poetry and prose instead of just poetry. Ah, well. There is still more than a month left in the window, and it might be that interested poets are taking more time polishing their works.

I have not had the same feeling of absolutely kicking backside in July that I did in June, though I think this is more appearance/feelings than anything else. June was a very heavily “front loaded” month for me, as it started directly after WisCon. July started with a family vacation. I keep catching myself feeling like I’ve accomplished nothing except for posting a short story I actually wrote in June, and while it’s true that there have been a lot of days where I’ve set immediate goals I did not reach, I have crossed more items off my monthly goal list than that.

I still have a lot left to do in the last week of the month, but I’ve done a lot in a week before.

Financial Status

Basically unchanged. My Patreon pledge total been hovering just below 400, sometimes with two steps forward, one back. It went down yesterday by enough that I noticed. I’m not sure if that was a response to me tweeting about Black Lives Matter and police violence, or because the $10 benefit is right now kind of contingent on people buying the $25 benefit, or just someone no longer has the financial ability to give that kind of support. I’m not saying this to call the person out and ask them to account for themselves; truth is that they don’t owe me an explanation any more than they owe me money.

There’s actually an “exit survey” thing that I never look at. If I had a few thousand supporters, maybe that would feel like anonymous data from which I could gauge general trends. With just over a hundred (and less than that, in all previous months), it feels kind of creepy and invasive to be scrutinizing individual motivations for leaving. I’m grateful people pledge any amount of money for any amount of time. In general terms, I would rather not be told when they leave, or why.

It does slightly change the odds on hitting the $400 mark before the end of the month, though. I really hope I make it back.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. I think for July and August I just might have to build a two hour nap into my afternoon schedule. It tends to happen anyway. I think my days would be more productive and better ordered, and my mental health better, if I just counted on it happening.

Plans For Today

Ideally what will happen is I’ll finish and post the chapter of Tales of MU that I started yesterday.

The Daily Report

So, an interesting thing happened yesterday. For the second time, someone tapped me on the electronic shoulder regarding one of my medium pieces and asked for permission to reprint/crosspost it on their site. After some discussion of terms, I accepted, and now my satirical news story about men sitting alone in Ghostbusters theaters is up on Global Comment. I have to say, I prefer my original headline, comically unwieldy as it was, but the site has its own priorities.

I’m curious to see how well it does there. So far if the little Facebook widget on the articles are accurate, it seems like its already the most-shared recent piece. None of the other widgets are registering any shares, which is odd since I used them to post it to Twitter and Tumblr. It’ll be interesting to see where it tops out, and in particular how it compares to the numbers for the Medium version. The experiment might inform some of my decisions regarding the placement of future pieces.

Financial Status

Things continue apace. My Patreon is still hovering just below $400. Tips are slow. Household is fine.

The State of the Me

Yesterday I had rising anxiety all throughout the day. Saying I did not have a good night last night would be an understatement, and I remain tense and fragile feeling today. I kind of just hope I can get through today without breaking down.

Plans For Today

…that notwithstanding, it is a work day and I am working. Not sure on what yet, but there’s a lot to be done.

The Daily Report

Well, some of my plans yesterday got derailed by sudden extreme weather. There was a heck of a squall. At its peak, it was raining so much and the wind was blowing so hard that Jack pulled his car over on the way to the store to text me and ask if a hurricane had somehow managed to sneak up on us.  It was “just” a severe thunderstorm, but he couldn’t see one foot past the windshield.

I lost a little bit of progress on a couple drafts to power dips. Not a lot of actual words (thank you, autosave!) but enough to take the wind out of my sails, especially as the lights continued to flicker. I really need to think about getting an uninterruptible power supply for my office. It sucks to have to switch to a mobile solution when bad weather rolls in.

It wasn’t a bad day, all in all, though. My Ghostbusters piece was a hit. It got picked up in a few unexpected places, and the director of the movie liked a tweet that contained a link to it. Granted that he has liked a lot of tweets mentioning his little film, so it might just be random social media engagement, but I like thinking that he might have read it.

Interesting thing is that while the Ghostbusters piece spread faster initially than the “Infidelity” one, that one gained steam more as it went, and it also generated a lot more revenue. It’s possible I picked up a patron or two on the strength of the new piece (always hard to tell where they’re coming from), but nothing in the way of tips.

…suddenly hitting me that the Infidelity piece had my support links woven into a little bio at the end, that was humorously tied into the theme of the piece, while the Ghostbusters one has—as have all my more recent Medium pieces—a generic, large-text copy I’ve been using. No other Medium piece of mine has generated the same level of income as the “Infidelity” one did, but none of them had anything like the same viral legs.

So maybe the lesson here is that the organic bio (bio-organic?) approach that ties into the piece keeps people reading long enough to register the links and click on them, while the shouty approach just registers as “Okay, the thing I came for is over and now here are the commercials.”

This is why I do so much post-morteming on my own work. It’s easier to spot these patterns after the fact.

Financial Outlook

Well, I’m going to be adjusting my Medium strategy on the basis of the above observation, and maybe that will shake loose some more change mid-month and alleviate that anxiety I was talking about yesterday. Other than that? Things pretty much continue.

The State of the Me

I drank a lot more water yesterday. This makes a huge difference to my well-being, particularly at the height of the summer, but it’s the kind of thing that’s harder to think of or manage the worse off I am. Yesterday I was already doing a lot better, and as a result, I was able to take better care of myself.

Plans For Today

It feels kind of like a “muddle through” day, not in the sense that I’m struggling but there’s no particular direction. I’m going to putter around creatively and see what happens.

The Daily Report

Well! Last week was very bumpy for me, but I had a pretty good weekend, physical fatigue notwithstanding.

I did not expect the opening of the submission window at Ligature Works would cause an immediate rush of submissions, as it’s a brand new venue and no one knew what to expect, guidelines-wise. There wasn’t a long build-up time before I even discussed that it was going to open, and I didn’t talk it up much in the interval. I was intellectually prepared to wait a week or more to get my first submission, or to have them start trickling in during the back half of the window.

Well, they started to come in on Saturday, and I now have several stories sitting in the Dropbox folder into which they’re deposited. I’ve only given them a quick initial read through, since it was the weekend, but I like what I’m seeing. I can’t wait for poetry to start coming in.

The next two weeks (inclusive of this one) are going to be a bit busy for me, since I was so out of it last week and AFK the week before. I have to keep reminding myself how many goals I crossed off in the first two weeks of June, and that the “big” thing for the month (the short story) was knocked off before the start of the month. I can do this. I didn’t promise anything that I can’t do.

Financial Outlook

Until I really hit the next level in my audience-building and crowdfunding efforts, I think I’m going to have to used to the idea that the middle of the month is going to be a little tense. We’re doing muuuuch better than we were mid-June, mind you. As a household we’re fine. I’m just personally feeling a bit insecure with the adjustment from “mainly dribbles of income throughout the month” to “large infusions of income at the start/end of the month”. I’ll get over it in time, especially as each month of growth means that I have more left over after regular monthly expenses.

In terms of the longer term: things are going well. My Patreon is just a smidge shy of $400, really believe we’ll cross that line before the end of the month. The Tales of MU Patreon hasn’t grown much at all this month. I still have a lot of anxiety connected to that project and my inability to write on a consistent basis for so much of the time since my move, which means I’m not pushing it as much as I probably could or should be.  There is going to be a point where I need more people kicking in to it for it to be worth it to keep the project going, though. If it actually did average out to $50 a chapter ($55 is the official tally right now), I’d be sanguine if not ecstatic. But I basically only see that on

The State of the Me

I feel loads better than I did last week, even than I did yesterday. I’m taking a lot of naps and drinking a lot of water, going to bed early even if I can’t immediately sleep, just to make sure that I’m not staying up all night and getting plenty of rest. Monday’s my usual cooking day and I have opted for a crockpot specifically so I won’t have to stand around in the kitchen near a heat source. This will also help me manage the end of my day a little more easily.

Plans For Today

Going to be focusing on creative stuff today, to try to kick off a week of high-gear writing. There’s a Tales of MU draft due. I’m going to be working on a chapter of my Patreon serial, Making Out Like Bandits. I would like to a Monday Monster, but none of my ideas are really gelling.

The Daily Report

I’m having a really hard time coming to grips with the way my week is going. At the start of June, I was just back from WisCon and I hit the ground running, kicking of an amazing month of writing and accomplishing things. Here I am back from vacation and I feel like my wheels are spinning ineffectually. I didn’t get much done Tuesday beyond posting the chapter I’d already written. Yesterday, I wrote a satirical news story that was about a week past its prime, but it was stuck in my head and I needed to get it out.

I had a similar experience with a long essay I wrote this morning, responding to some of the more baffling criticism I’d seen around an open letter released yesterday under the heading of “We Are The Left”. It wasn’t really something I wanted to devote two hours to, but until I got it out, I found my attention kept wandering back to Twitter where I could shake my head and wonder how people were getting something so twisted.

This is part of my basic advice to any writer: write what you have to write. Sometimes what’s in the pipeline isn’t what you want to say, but until you get it out, you’re not getting anything else past it.

Financial Status

Outlook basically good.

The State of the Me

Up and down. Wibbly-wobbly. Emotionally and physically, I’m on way shakier ground than I like, to the point that I kind of just want to shut myself away from the world for a few days with nothing to do and no responsibilities, no pressure, just a chance to rest and find my equilibrium. Life doesn’t work like that, though. Even if it were an option, even if I didn’t have responsibilities, I don’t currently have a real space set up to do that. So I will muddle through as best I can, at half speed or quarter speed.

Plans For Today

The one thing that absolutely has to happen is a draft of Tales of MU. That’s all I’m focusing on.

The Daily Report

Well, yesterday certainly was a day. I am glad I set the bar pretty low on tasks, as my body had more ups and downs than I had expected based on how I felt when I first woke up. I achieved both the practical goals, though I did not post my MU draft until just before midnight.

This was based on my dissatisfaction with a growing pattern of the Monday drafts seeming to more often be less complete than the Thursday drafts, for reasons having to do with the calendar. The long-term cure for that is getting ahead and staying ahead, which is part of my goal for this week.

Financial Status

The temporary cashflow problem of yesterday not only ended yesterday, but I’ve now got a comfortable bit of padding. Not “able to absorb a serious emergency” padding, but “unexpected expenditures won’t result in overdraft charges” padding. It might wind up being necessary for groceries next week, but at least I have it.

The State of the Me

Very mixed, physically and emotionally, but with the balance on the positive. My body kind of feels, for lack of a better term, flux-y, right now. I’m switching gears between two different states’ allergens, two different sleep schedules, two different levels of exertion, two different sets of eating habits, two regimes regarding my supplements, etc.

Plans For Today

Well, I’m going to be posting a chapter of Tales of MU later today, but I’m also going to be trying to write the next one.

The Daily Report

Well, back in the saddle. Last week (being on vacation but still posting a thing each work day) was an interesting experience. It went well enough, but I feel like if I ever do something like that again I’m going to want to bring my laptop or be so far ahead that I literally have nothing to do except make a draft go live. Putting together a chapter or story from sprint segments written in ILYS is a lot trickier on a tiny mobile screen.

Last work week, I made the late-night decision to push forward with my plans for creating a venue for publishing poetry and fiction. At the time, I was thinking I’d formally announce it on my first day back. I’m now realizing that I could only pull that off if I basically spent this entire day getting things in order for that, and I don’t really want to do that. There are a lot of other things I need to work on right now. So, I’m going to set that for Friday instead.

I really wanted to have at least the mechanism and guidelines for submissions up today so people could start thinking about what they have they might want to send in and/or crafting and/or polishing a piece for it, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like submissions guidelines for a new venue that has no statement of principles or identity is putting the cart before the horse.

Financial Status

Well, we went a bit over budget on the vacation thing. Mostly due to the circumstances I mentioned in my previous post, there were a few fewer family dinners and a bit more eating out than we’d expected. I don’t really have regrets, though? I mean, I don’t know which of our experiences I’d give up for a bit more financial stability right now.

The one thing I’d change is I’d have been more assertive in telling the person who repeatedly swiped my debit card when it didn’t go through the first time that we’d just pay cash if their system was acting up. I currently have $90 in duplicate pending authorizations on my account. I’ve worked enough customer service to know that no matter who you talk to about those, the answer is that it’s someone else’s responsibility and they’ll just expire. Luckily this account does not charge overdraft fees, but I have $75 in actual otherwise spendable money that’s tied up with this nonsense.

Despite this—which Jack points out is yet another week of being affected by financial institutions and their peculiarities—I still feel like overall we’re in a better place and still getting better. I mean, we came into this month with a lot more breathing room. If next month were just going to be the same but without the vacation, we’d be in great shape. But it actually stands to be better, due to continued growth on both my personal and Tales of MU patreons, and while I do have that little “world-con” thing going on, that’s been independently funded.

The State of the Me

Since this recent trip wound up being so similar to our first family trip to Nebraska two years ago, it served as a good benchmark of how my health and fitness have generally improved. We did a lot of the same things but I’m a lot less drained. I was super tired every night when we got back to the hotel room, but not exhausted or fatigued in a long term sense, and here I am the first day of the work week after, right back in the thick of things.

Since I wasn’t working, I took the opportunity to skip most of my mood/braining supplements for a week to try to wipe out accumulated tolerance. I currently cycle between a few different combinations for that reason, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to wipe the slate clean. There were some side effects early on, but I think it was the right move.

Plans For Today

So, I’ve got three basic things on the docket for today. One is some miscellaneous administrivia/correspondence that I’ve been sitting on. Two is doing a Monday monster. Three is writing the draft for the next Tales of MU chapter.

If the money thing shakes itself loose (or I get enough in odd tips that the holds don’t matter), I will also be ducking out for a quick grocery shopping trip.

We’re going to be leaving here in about an hour or two for a 4th of July/family get-together in Nebraska. My bag’s packed, we’ve got our house sitters situated. I have two chapters of Tales of MU and a short story for July written, so I can keep my MU schedule up for the week I’m away and have some content for my patrons for the week.

I’ll have my phone and tablet and possibly my laptop (still thinking about effort vs. reward calculations there), but I’ll also be 1) doing other things and 2) on vacation, so I expect my presence here and on the social mediums will be a bit slacker than they have been lately between now and next Monday.

The Daily Report

I’ve already blogged twice today and haven’t done my status post, but it’s not a normal day and it’s not going to be a normal workday, either. It’s the last day before we leave in the very early morning for a flight back to Nebraska for 4th of July and family time.

I’ve been looking at how my MU pledges for June shook out, and honestly, if I just take next week off, the impact is only going to be something in the neighborhood of $30. I am still going to keep to the schedule, because it’s the start of only the second month of it, but if things stand similarly in August I’m not going to sweat missing a couple of updates around WorldCon.

Things are still pretty much happening for me here. My modestly viral Medium piece has crossed 20,000 hits and over 100 recommendations by Medium users (to say nothing of shares on Twitter, Facebook, etc.) It’s popping up on forums and mailing lists, too. It’s definitely slowed down, but it’s got more momentum 5 days out than I would have expected, and while it’s hard to convert that into long-term income, it has garnered a few new patrons, a few notable tips, and some interesting nods from unexpected people. I’m not going to mention anyone by name, but I am going to write it down, because my work is an experiment and that’s the only difference between science and screwing around.

I also got a lovely and unexpected notice from the restaurant supply company I linked to the other week, thanking me for my blog post informing people how to best use their services. That was an unexpected lift.

Author, blogger, journalist, comic book writer, and just general all around Renaissance woman Mikki Kendall gave the parody post a big boost early on in the Twitternets, and she also gave a push to my short story for June, “Women Making Bees In Public“. That was really a great experience, because she was a big influence in my current Patreon model.

It’s actually pretty much down to a combination of her and fellow Twitter luminary and novelist, Saladin Ahmed, talking about their own plans. Saladin recently launched his Patreon as a “story of the month” model after a long struggle with a word drought. Mikki was talking about something like a story of the week model, which… okay. I’m ambitious. But I can’t do that and Tales of MU, and anyway, my interests are too scatterd for the same thing every week. But them both talking about the fact that they could do this and ways to make it pay is what both convinced me to focus my Patreon efforts a little better and helped me hit on the model I ended up on, which has a short story a month as one of its features.

That’s a digression. The point is, “Bees” is showing early signs of catching on fire. I think it’s well-positioned as a follow-up to “Infidelity”, given the underlying social dynamics it’s exploring. I think the next short story, “The Numbers Game”, will likewise slot nicely in. It is admittedly a bit more of a traditionally structured story than “Bees” is, to the point that I considered shopping it around and writing a different story for July, since I have the whole month, but it’s enough in the same vein as my recent big pictures that I feel like there’s a “Strike while the iron is hot.” kind of situation. I’d rather have “The Numbers Game” come out next week when people are looking for my next thing then months from now when eyes have moved on.

So stuff’s happening.

Financial Status

Pretty good right now? I need to keep growing things through July, but in good shape for the moment.

The State of the Me

Can’t complain. I acquired a stubborn splinter in my foot late yesterday and I was a little concern that it would resist removal and I’d be traveling on it, but a little strategic soaking and I was able to tease it out.

Plans For Today

I have a chapter of Tales of MU to post and two to write. I might be nervous about this, except I started writing yesterday at 3:30 and had 6,600 words by 7:00. I also don’t have to finish both chapters tonight, as I’ll have parts of the overnight and the travel day.

The Daily Report

Well, it’s been wild, but I do believe that thing I wrote the other day is winding down. It had its smallest yet overnight increase in stats, there are no new major sites/categories showing up in the referral links. In terms of dollars and cents, it brought in $150 of money I can directly link to it and increased my Patreon patronage by just north of $20 a month.

Not life-changing, but it came at a good time, and it’s still a better deal than HuffPo.

Had a bit of a setback yesterday while finishing up my short story for the month. I was writing on my tablet, using a Bluetooth keyboard that has several one-touch shortcut keys including ones that launch other apps. I don’t make a lot of typos, but one errant keypress and my tablet switched screens and dumped something like 46 minutes of progress. Frustrating.

I’ll say one thing about my current comeback as a writer: I’m a lot better at rolling with punches. Before that would have killed my creative drive for the day, and even after that I would have found it very hard to re-create the parts I’d written and lost.

As things stood, I was a bit flustered about it, especially since I was trying to constrain myself to finishing and posting it by end of day yesterday. I succeeded by dint of working an hour late, and there was some sloppy editing towards the end… something I fixed, lost, and then overlooked. It can be hard to edit your own work for things like mistakes because it’s easy to look at the page and see your intentions.

If I could do it over again, I would not have lost almost an hour’s work. But failing that, I would have slept on it and looked at it with fresh eyes before posting it today. Ah, well. At least not many people saw the version with the poorly edited ending.

I’d like to find someone to disable/remap specific keys on the keyboard to avoid this in the future. Failing that, I’ll just have to be more careful about working in Office and not Drive. I got lazy and tried working on the story in Docs because that’s what the default option was for opening a text file I downloaded from ILYS. It’s not yet second nature to me that Microsoft has pulled away from Google in the reliability of their persistent autosave.

Financial Status

Well, the much wished-for end of month has finally arrived. We did get a little lift from the “Sad Boner” piece.  Over the next few days, I’ll be getting a slightly better idea of my current circumstances, re: Patreon.

The State of the Me

A little tired today.

Plans For Today

Main thing I’m working on is Tales of MU. Also going to have to make a decision about next week, which will be based in large part on how things go today and tomorrow.