The Daily Report

Well, as frequently happens this time of year, I just got back from my best WisCon ever. I felt weird initially, as it felt like something was subtly off about the con or the reception I received there. It wasn’t hostile, wasn’t even unfriendly, just different in a way that initially registered to me as colder. When it settled into me what had changed, though, I realized it wasn’t a bad thing: I wasn’t giving off any “lost/newbie/overwhelmed” signals so no one was coming to my rescue or acting to put me at my ease. Because I didn’t need any such attention, I didn’t miss it, but because it had always been a part of my initial con experience each year, I did notice a difference.

As soon as I realized what that difference was, I made a point to pay things forward. I looked for people who looked lost. I listened for questions in crowded hallways. I broadcast on Twitter when we would be going to the pool so that other congoers would know 1) there is a pool, 2) they wouldn’t be the only con folks there if they went, and 3) they wouldn’t be the only trans and/or queer people in the pool, if applicable. I made a point to make myself available to people who felt alone or unsafe. I think in doing so I made at least one really good friend of someone I was only sort of tangentially in generalized internet/fandom contact with before.

When I lay it all out like that in paragraph form, it sounds like a job in the sense of a thankless chore, and while it is certainly labor that takes time and energy (and labor that is worth valuing as labor), it’s not a matter of “I did this instead of enjoying the con and hanging out with people”. It was the structure by which I spent some of my time enjoying the con and hanging out with people.

Because I saw this con from a very different perspective than previous ones, I also came from it with what I feel is a better understanding about certain dynamics. I will write a bigger blog post about this in more detail in the near future, but the short version is that I’ve realized the merit of doing fan events in giving people who admire and enjoy one’s work a context and framework in which they know that stepping forward and interacting with you is not just acceptable but welcome.

So that coupled with the knowledge (pointed out by Jack) that next summer is the 10th anniversary of Tales of MU’s launch led me to an off-the-cuff Twitter announcement: next year, at WisCon 41, I will be hosting a 10th birthday party for Tales of MU. Or maybe a 10 year class reunion. I don’t know. We have a year to sort that out, and if you’re a MU reader and/or a fan of mine who has been interested in coming to WisCon and/or meeting me, you have a year to plan your trip. WisCon always takes place on Memorial Day weekend, always in beautiful downtown Madison, Wisconsin, and is always is held at the Madison Concourse Hotel (so if you’re early enough in reserving your room that you can get one in the main hotel, you do not have to worry about travel logistics or going outside to get to the main con events).

Economic Outlook

Pretty good! I had really been hoping my Patreon would blow up before the end of the month in a way that it didn’t, but my WorldCon fund did in a way that I really didn’t think it would. I have everything except for the hotel taken care of, will be buying memberships as soon as funds clear.

I do have to unexpectedly buy a new bluetooth keyboard, as my old one died during the con. That’s a minor expenditure.

The State of the Me

You know, when I announced that I was going to get Tales of MU running on a multi-update basis again on June 1st and when I decided I was going to start all these cool new things in June, I was under a mistaken impression about the distance between the con and the end of May. I was figuring that would give me a bit under a week of recovery time and padding between the end of the con and when I needed to kick things into high gear. I’m not sure from where I got that impression, but I had it, and it was wrong.

Turns out that’s okay. Despite having come back to a house that was swelteringly hot and has very little of the sort of food that I need to be eating, despite having had a fairly restless night, today, the day after I got home, I am feeling pretty good. This is my best post-con day ever. Mentally and physically. I can feel the touches of fatigue, but I’m not exhausted, there’s not all-encompassing cognitive fog, I haven’t forgotten all my big plans and dreams, and I’m ready to go on putting them in order. I’m a little unfocused, insofar as I wrote most the daily report section of this post then got caught up in household-organizational stuff (putting things back in order after almost a week with other people living here instead of us) and talking on the twitters about the free speeches.

Plans For Today

Okay. So. Today’s the beginning of the next book of Tales of MU. Big doings there in the afternoon. Between now and then, I’m going to be blogging a lot, though I’m not yet sure if it will be lots of small posts or fewer, bigger ones. I have a lot to say.

The Daily Report

Well, my WorldCon travel fund is going well. Almost halfway there, and more than enough for plane tickets. Just waiting on the money to hit my bank account, and then I’ll set the travel arrangements. At that point, my plans are made.

So, yesterday I was selecting stories and queuing them up to go live on this blog at noon each day through the end of May. I made some kind of error in the planning phase when I was counting how many stories I would need, though. I think I got distracted in the middle and accidentally subtracted Monday’s story (which went live as soon as it was chosen instead of being queued) twice. However it happened, I spent a good portion of the day picking eight stories and then found a day left over when I added them to the queue.

The upshot is I have one more story to pick than I was counting on, and from moment to moment I vacillate between not being able to choose between several stories or completely drawing a blank as to what could fill the slot. After some consideration, though, I’ve decided to bend the rules a bit and instead of one short story, putting a couple of shorter stories (longer flash fiction pieces that straddle the line between flash and short, basically) and one poem that tells a story. While I’m offering one full-length short story each month as part of my revamped and revitalized Patreon, it’s not all I have to offer, and I figure my preview should reflect that.

The State of the Me

Doing well.

Plans For Today

Well, I’m putting some finishing touches on the queue for the rest of the month, and also kicking around ideas for a Sad Puppies Review Books. It’s not a guarantee that something will come to me before I start closing things down for the trip, but if something does, it’ll go up in this space like normal.

The Daily Report

Well, the end of last week and this past weekend were… interesting. I made some plans, got some perspective, and took a few steps. I have a fundraiser specifically for the purpose of getting myself and Jack to WorldCon, and its first day, it brought in enough for us to buy plane tickets (the most time-critical element of the expenses) as soon as the withdrawal clears. Every $150 thrown into the pot will net a new satirical piece along the lines of my popular Sad Puppies Review Books features. The first one, a SPRB treatment for Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, went up over the weekend. I’ll be doing the remainders about one a week.

I’m kicking around ideas for my next satire, but the Mike Mulligan review may wind up counting for this week, as we leave for WisCon the day after tomorrow. The con doesn’t actually start properly until Friday, although there are some kick-off events on Thursday. So why Wednesday? Well, last year, I screwed up the dates when I was buying plane tickets and only noticed the day before our flights that they were a day earlier than our hotel reservations. So we had a frantic scramble to get ready and to find accommodations… but when all was said and done, we found it was less stressful to do it that way then to travel and not have a full day to recover, rest, and decompress before we start socialing and doing things. Also, the further our travel is away from the actual weekend, the easier a time we have with the airports. It does add to the expense of the thing, but in years that we can all go, WisCon basically winds up being our big blow-out.

In some ways, it’s my usual impeccably terrible sense of timing that I’m gearing up to kick hindquarters and take names right before we have to leave, especially since the con tends to wipe me out, physically and emotionally. I’m also bad at calendars. When I started planning, I managed to simultaneously convince myself that the con was both further away in the future, and also further from the end of May. It only just now hit me that June 1st is the day after we get back, and not a week after that. Oops.

Oh, well. You know what? I have never felt as good going into the con as I do this year. My physical health is better than it’s been in my adult life. So full speed ahead and dang the torpedoes. We’re doing this. MU updates still resume June 1st, and the beginning of June is still when I kick all my plans into high gear.

One of the things I did last week was split my Patreon into two, one for “support Alexandra Erin the author” on a monthly basis and one for “support Tales of MU” on a per-update basis. The MU one is currently at $35, which amounts to something around a penny a word… not the best rate, but a good start. My secret inner benchmark for MU being worth it to keep writing has always been $50 a chapter, so that’s what I really hope to see as a baseline, but I completely understand it not being there before I’ve even started updating again. At this point there aren’t even links on the MU website that point to the new Patreon.

The personal Patreon attracted some new patrons but the number of patrons and monthly income more or less stayed the same, as older supporters who are only or mainly interested in TOMU took the opportunity to make that officially clear. I kind of expected that. the The fact is that if both campaigns gain or lose no one between now and the end of June, I still stand to make substantially more money from that month than I am this month, because the MU campaign is based on number of updates.

I plan on growing the MU Patreon by proving its value with quality and consistency of updates. Proving the value of the author one is going to be a little trickier. The most successful crowdfunding campaigns for authors are from ones who have the kind of large established following that is easier to build if you achieve success in traditional publishing. I am in the weird but not necessarily bad position of having done more recently to impress my fellow authors than my fellow readers.

So my immediate plan to “prove my brand” as an author is to, in the run up to the end of the month, re-publish one of my favorite short stories or similar works of mine a day, with a link to my author Patreon at the end.

This way I can show people what they’d be supporting, exactly, and what they’d be getting in return.

The State of the Me

Doing good. I think I mentioned I had a terrible insomnia episode going into Friday. I slept well over the weekend, though I paid for the missed sleep pretty dearly.

Plans For Today

Okay, if you were paying attention to the long and meandering daily report, you might have noticed I have a plan to re-publish eight short stories between now and the end of the month, and that two days from now I am leaving on a trip that ends the last day of this month. This means that my main task for today is going to be selecting those eight stories and getting them queued up as posts.

The Daily Report

I’ve decided to resume my formal daily posts. As much as trying to keep them up when I’d hit bottom caused more problems than it solved, they’re a useful tool for structuring my work day and work week, and it gives me a good record of both how I’m doing and what I’m doing.

Objectively, this has been a good week for me. On Monday, I created and shared two things. On Tuesday, I wrote a fairly long short story. Yet yesterday, when I couldn’t get up the focus to produce something, I felt once again like I’m stuck in an uncreative rut, that I am a disappointment and failure because I might go one single day without producing something I can point to and say, “See what I did?” This despite the fact that it was three days into the week and I had already posted three things to my Patreon.

Part of the reason I came up with the idea of posting things as Things of the Day was to make it easier to remind myself that yes, I am doing things and making things that people enjoy. The downside is that it’s become another arbitrary standard to live up to.

The reality is that no week in which I write an entire short story should be seen as a waste, no matter what happens in the rest of it. The reality is that this has been a profoundly creative and successful week, and it’s not over yet.

Mikki Kendall (author, comic book writer, and journalist) has been talking on Twitter about setting up a Patreon where she writes one short story a week. I think of her as a dynamo. I look at all the things she does and I feel humbled. And I know she can do this. But the thing is, I know I can, too. The difference is when she talks about writing a story a week, I say, “Wow, what drive! What talent!” but when I look at myself and think about a story a week, I think, “Well, that’s a start. What else have you got?”

And it’s not that I think I should be doing better than her. I look up to her. That’s just how perverse this kind of thinking can be. When someone I admire is doing something, I can recognize that it’s admirable. With me? I’m stuck with these feelings that if something comes easily, I’m not applying myself and if something takes work, I’m not good enough to do it.

Writing a short story every week for me more or less amounts to writing one in one day. It has to be the right day, I have to have the right block of time and the right idea, but when it all comes together it happens in one day. The one short story I sold externally last year was written in a day. “Walk Briskly” and my long short story in Angels of the Meanwhile were each written in a day. It’s just how I write.

But I find myself thinking, if I could write those stories in one day, and there are five work days in a week, why don’t I have five stories? Or even “just” three or four, to allow for bad days and off days.

I’ve certainly had to tell my share of ill-informed critics over the years that writing is creative labor, not mechanical labor. I can sit at a keyboard and punch buttons to make words come out, but that isn’t the same as making a story come out of it.

Like so many other things of this nature, I can explain this to others and mean it when I say it. The problem is telling it to myself.

I think maybe this is part of why I started floundering when I stopped engaging so much with people who would make the same complaints, the same arguments, the same accusations over and over again. There is no doubt in my mind that dealing with all of that was detrimental to my health and a suck of my time and energy, but it also certainly helped reinforce to me that I knew what I was doing, when I spent a good portion of every week defending myself to people who were sure that I didn’t.

So basically I’ve got two approaches that I know are unsustainable. I cannot be the queen bitch of the internet flame war and I cannot be a shrinking violet terrified equally by the lurking specters of success and failure. It seems like the obvious answer is to strike a balance, but if I knew where that balance was or how to maintain it I wouldn’t be here.

That’s not to say I don’t have any answers, or any plans. I did yesterday hit on the solution to some of my long-term plans regarding the use of Patreon and how I position and sell myself. I think this post is long enough as it is, though, and I don’t want to bury my plan of action under this meandering introspection.

The State of the Me

So, an upper respiratory thing has been making its way through my household and it’s my turn to have it apparently. A little scratchiness of the throat, a runny nose, achy joints, and a little bit of brain fog is the worst of it. Nothing serious. Not even terribly bad fatigue. If not for the aches, I’d assume my allergies were flaring up. This particular ache is always an infection thing for me.

It’s coming at an okay time, all things considered. I’ve already done quite a bit this week, so if it knocks me on my backside tomorrow then no real harm done. I’ll probably be over it by WisCon time next week.

Plans For Today

I’m about to get out of the house in part to try to clear out some cobwebs. Later this afternoon I’ll make a post outlining my plans for Patreon. I may also kick around some flash fiction ideas.

Every once in a while, I have a day where I can cut through all the B.S. in my head and just sit down and start writing. My major goal in life is to figure out how this happens and make it happen more often.

Today I woke up with a small idea for a story in my head. I sat down to try to write it. I wound up writing something else instead. That’s okay. Part of why it worked is I followed where the idea took me, not where I had expected it to take me.

The resulting story (short story, 4000 words) is now up as a patron-only piece on my Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/AlexandraErin).

I know that part of the B.S. in my head is that the kinds of stories I like to write—and the plural is used deliberately, as it’s not like I write just one kind—don’t sell easily. They tend to be longer and more introspective. I don’t always have a traditional plot or the conflict that people are looking for. The story I wrote today falls into a niche that I’ve started calling “eldritch realism”… stories that are to horror what magical realism is to fantasy. It’s not a horror story. It’s kind of like a Lovecraft story if, when faced with something unfathomable, people in Lovecraft just shrugged and got on with their lives.

I also know that Patreon is really an ideal solution to the problem of writing things that I know people want to read but I don’t know who’d want to publish. That’s basically what it’s there for. You can support me directly, if you like to read the sorts of things I like to write, and you can read them.

But the feeling of “But how can I sell this?” still stops me dead in my tracks far too often. I know the market as it exists is not actually a referendum on anyone’s value. There are a lot of externals, a lot of hidden biases, a lot of randomness, a lot of confluences of circumstance, that flow together to make the market what it is at any given moment. I’ll tell anyone else who’s writing for themselves not to mistake the market’s actions for a judgment of their worth or the worth of their work, and I’ll mean it. I’ll mean every word and hope they believe me.

But it still gets me sometimes.

I’m having a good week so far. I’m a little gunshy about observing when I’m having a good week. It’s like I’m afraid I’m going to jinx it. But yesterday I designed and posted a monster, which sparked some inspiration that might turn into a new D&D pamphlet, and I wrote a filk song. Today I wrote 4,000 contiguous words of fiction that I’m happy with. That’s good.

Sometimes I make a post like this and people (who, I’m sure, are mostly well-meaning) tell me not to focus on the negative or stop dwelling or whatever. They miss the point that if I’m talking about my problems, that means I feel good enough to confront them. A lot of my blogs over the years have had a tagline along the lines of “quietly thinking out loud”. I’m not necessarily writing them so that people can keep up with me, though you’re welcome to do that. I’m definitely not writing anything here looking for advice, unless I explicitly say so. Most of the time, I’m just working through things, the best way that I know how.

So, my recent and unexpected travel combined with disruptions to my dietary regimen knocked me on my ass for about a week. Longer than I’d hoped/expected, even though the disruption was expected. I’m back in the saddle and will be starting the next book of Tales of MU this week or the next.

One thing I have really struggled with over the years is finding a healthy balance in terms of my self-image. At my most productive, I feel invincible and feel like a creative demigod who can do no wrong. At my least productive, I feel like a fraud and a sham who is incapable of anything. In my attempts to work past this, I vacillate between trying to find a way to ride the feelings of omnipotence or remove my reliance on them.

There’s a saying that perfect is the enemy of good; i.e., as long as you believe that no imperfection is acceptable, you will never accomplish anything and so deeds or works or acts that would otherwise be good fall by the wayside, abandoned or repudiated because they aren’t perfect.

I think this saying is appropriate when talking about how we deal with other people. It’s possible to idealize others, which leaves us in the position where we can be disappointed and even betrayed by something very small; the proverbial fly in the ointment.

But when it comes to ourselves, I believe it’s not the quest for perfection that’s the problem, exactly. I think a better maxim would be that acceptable is the enemy of good. There’s nothing wrong with striving for perfection, it’s the idea that there’s a minimum standard of acceptability that’s the problem. Absent this, you can try for perfect, you can try for better, but still be satisfied with good, or even good enough, or even the best you can do at the moment.

Actually, I used the phrase “good enough” in that last sentence, but I think that’s the whole problem right there. What’s enough? How do you know when it’s enough? If you don’t know if something is enough, the only thing you can really do is ask yourself, “Could there be more?” As long as the answer is yes, you can try to do more, raising the chances that you’ll hit that invisible and unknowable benchmark of sufficiency for which you’re striving.

The solution is not to throw out any concept of good or perfect or better (which is my favorite target/goal, not to do it right or to do it perfectly or do it well but do it better), but to throw out the idea of enough.

I’m intermittently paralyzed by the feeling that I haven’t done enough, that I haven’t written enough or inspired enough or done enough to help the people in my life or been there enough, and if this motivated me to do better, it would be fine, but it doesn’t, it just sends me into an endless spiral of trying to figure out how to begin to make up the imagined deficit.

I keep thinking of 2015 as being a ghost year or wasted year for me, a stand-out year among wasted years in a wasted life. I know this isn’t true, intellectually. 2015 was the year I became a published poet, and the year for which I received my first two Rhysling nominations. 2015 was the year I wrote two short stories that I think are the best I’ve ever written (“Walk Briskly” and “Inside, Looking Out”, which is in Angels of the Meanwhile.) It was the year of Sad Puppies Review Books and my improbable collaboration with John Scalzi. It was the year for which I made the Hugo longlist, and if I didn’t make it onto the ballot, it’s not for any reason having anything to do with me.

But fear of measuring up to some chimerical notion of “enough” still halts me in my tracks. Sometimes it keeps me from starting things. Sometimes it keeps me from finishing them. Sometimes it just keeps me from telling anyone about them.

Despite the circumstances, seeing my family the other week helped me put some of this into perspective and gave me the shot in the arm (it’s a mind-arm, I guess) that I needed. It’s just taken me a while to regain my physical equilibrium.

…and not sure how or why I’m not having a good day, or how to articulate it, but feeling the need to, anyway. Not looking for advice or sympathy; just letting people who are interested in the question of “How am I doing?” know, and leaving myself a record for later in case there’s a pattern.

Causally, there’s a lot of stress right now relating to jury duty. It’s also springtime in Maryland, also known as vespiform hell. Our state bird is an oriole that was stung to death by wasps. I’m pretty chill about things with stingers. I know how to co-exist with them. If it was just me, I would open a window and wait for it to take a hint.

But my office is also the main cat room, and our cats… they are not mighty hunters before the Lord, but they have instincts, and these instincts might lead them to do something that might end regrettably if there’s something with a venomous stinger set on repeat trapped with them. And I’m also a bit leery about opening windows enough to encourage a bug to fly out them when the cats are around. But there’s an upper limit on how long I can shut the cats out of here, which means a wasp in the office has to be dealt with. A spray bottle of soapy water and a fly swatter to follow-up with works wonders, but it still makes things a little tense leading up to it.

Notes for those who need to deal with individual wasps or hornets indoors in a pet-safe way: get spray bottle. Put dish soap in. Fill with hot water. Shake up a bit. Test the spray bottle a few times to make sure that it’s capable of repeat squirting. Wait until the target insect is in a docile phase, sitting on a window pane or something. Spray it. If it’s clinging to a surface, it will fall. Spray it a few more times. Keep spraying it. Spray it until it looks dead. Swat it. Swat it again. Keep swatting it until it looks dead. Swat it some more. Dispose of it.

In theory, the first treatment of soapy water will kill it… eventually. But a little extra soapy water is pretty cheap to make sure.

Anyway… I’m realizing as I type this that dealing with the office wasp situation disrupted my routine enough that I didn’t take my vitamins or mood pills this morning, which is probably why I’ve been having such a waste of a day. Rectifying that now.

So, this is going to be another weird week. I don’t have to report for jury duty again until Thursday, but it’s still coming up. I’m going to be boosting Angels of the Meanwhile throughout this week and the next. It’s a huge psychic load off my mind to have it put to bed; there are a lot of vicious cycles involved when you have commitments that you just can’t fulfill. I have a bad tendency to over-commit, which in practice works out to be almost indistinguishable from committing to nothing.

But, onwards and upwards.

In getting caught up on things, I’m working on simplifying them so that it’s harder to fall behind. I just made a Patrons-only post over on my Patreon talking about some of that.

Today is World Poetry Day. It’s also Monday, the day in which I have actually written most of my poems. I find poetry a great creative warm-up exercise. So in recognition of those facts, and the fact that I have been writing way more gaming content than straight fiction lately, I’m going to be spending my creative energy today working on poems.

I am writing Tales of MU. It’s going well enough that if not for the x-factor relating to jury duty (I am effectively “on call” until mid-April), I’d probably be posting already, or announcing a date.

I’m also working on other long-delayed things; though with the same caveats. Once my term of service as a juror is up, I’ll probably make an extensive blog about my experiences. I do have to say that my local court system does what it can to keep things as convenient as possible under the circumstances, though, there are practical limits to how convenient it can be.

My decision to hold off on publishing more of my D&D material for a month to see what happens has yielded the following results:

• First, assuming the trends hold for the next two weeks, I’m on track to make only a little less money this month than I did last month.
• Second, it’s a lot easier for me to keep to my “release a thing a week” plan when I’m not arbitrarily restricting which arenas in which I’m doing it. This is the third week of the month and the third week in a row in which I’m not putting something out for sale at the end of it. Again, jury duty and its caprices is a factor here.

I enjoy discussing D&D rules, answering questions, and giving advice, but I get fed up with the brocentric and mansplainy attitudes that permeate most spaces where people are talking about this subject. Accordingly, I have started a side blog at http://dungeons-demystified.tumblr.com where anyone playing 5E or looking to play 5E can ask questions or advice, and where I’ll share some general tips/basic definitions.

Why a side blog when I already talk about D&D here? Because semi-weekly Spherical Goblins posts are one things, but basically leavening my main blog with a D&D FAQ would either make the blog unusable as a general blog or the FAQ unusable as a FAQ.

I’m devoting today to getting one particular thing done, with an eye towards making an announcement about it at day’s end. That’s all I’ll say on the subject unless and until I’m ready to make that announcement.