Day 110

Spoiler Alert! May contain planning-stage plot/character details or other spoilers!

23 Jun 2016

Contains affiliate links. So the good news is that I’ve brought up my Klout score from about 30 to 50 over the last 90 days. The bad news is, it’s not like any of that reach is connected to the audience I really need. Lol marketing. Of course, Instagramming about alcohol is probably not the best move for an under 19 audience… but beer and Scotch posts get the most likes! Or hearts. Whatever. Hoping to push through to a good chunk more chapters today, since the last three days have been spent on only the first five. Which I just released as a public preview, so it makes sense to be cleaning them up, but… time is racing by. At warp speed.

Rewrites are interesting. There’s way more security in knowing where (more or less) the story and people are headed. Character is mostly set for everyone, so it’s just a matter of refining and trimming them back (ish) to be more clear and consistent. Although, every time I go in for editing, things get longer instead of shorter.

It’s probably bad that I keep comparing myself on writing quality instead of storytelling. Just started Jessica Day George’s Princess of the Silver Woods , and feeling confident like: yeah, I can do this! My writing is at least this good! …but I have zero objectivity when it comes to assessing how effective the story telling and characterization is, and it’s a foregone conclusion that I know how to put words in a pleasing order on a page. (I assume…)

Had a great visit with Michelle M. (well, back on Tuesday, but anyways), who despite coming up on baby no. 2 seems excited to publish with me, so one of these days I really need to pull out the story I tossed at her and see what I can do about trimming an (award-winning, lol) theme-driven short story into a viable picture book. Hoping that upcoming time with my 2-year-old cousin Jack will kick-start the process; it’s been too long since I paid much attention to how picture books work. But it’s kind of cool to diversify. Also hoping to help Michelle get an adult colouring book out, because hello trends. I wish I’d gotten on the idea of building it as an app when it first occurred to me, since I could have ridden that wave, and now we’re playing catch-up. But at the same time, there’s now an established market to tap into, which is great. A little worried about the mechanics of converting paper, IRL artwork to digital files for print, but cross that bridge when we come to it. Maybe we can get away with conventional scanning? If not, I think it’ll be a big initial investment, which is not where I want to go with things. I prefer to keep the gambling tipped in our favour (lol). But sometimes, nothing ventured… Yeah. We’ll see.

I’m still concerned about its quality. World building vs. action being the key tension. Is there a compelling enough or authentic enough voice to carry readers through the info-dumps? Or is it too ‘talking-heads’-y? Guess I’ll loop back for one more scan through the first five before trying to push onwards. So running out of time!!

Thursday

Start time: 9:30 am

Location: bedroom

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