Sunday Summary and #ROW80 Update

  1. This was my first week back at the Evil Day Job after the holiday and it was…rough.  Since I was sick for several days BEFORE the start of the holiday, there are things that I did not get tied up then.  So I hit the ground running Monday at 90 miles an hour, making lists galore and trying to sort out what all needed dealing with, in addition to the usual back from holiday crazy.  I finished everything (barely), but it left me mentally kind of frazzled.  I always give myself a week grace period to get back into my workout routine (which is in the morning–always a hard thing because over Christmas break my body clock rotates to its natural state, which is 3 hours later than my normal life requires), and I need to do the same with my writing.
  2. My goal this round is to write 1350 words a day…and that…didn’t happen.  I pulled it off Monday and I got over 2k Saturday.  But in between I had trouble hitting my test mile of 500 words each day.  A lot of that was me fighting with my hero and shero over what I wanted to happen and what they wanted to happen.  Sometimes I’m willing to let them have their way, but considering what they wanted to have their way with in this case was each other, and that would completely destroy the tension and narrative flow, I had to be strong.  I did finally sort out how to resolve that and I wound up with 5521 words (not counting whatever I’ll write today, which may not be much as we are headed to see my mother for our delayed Christmas since she had the flu).   I’m about 3k short of what I wanted AND this story is running longer than (it’s heading toward short novel territory instead of the 36k novella I had planned).  So this week, I need to revisit my outline to make sure what I have planned for the rest of the story is enough to narratively carry something that length.
  3. Went to see the last installment of The Hobbit last night.  Super disappointed.  There really was not enough story to carry 3 full movies and they made a lot of choices I didn’t like.  Forgot what a depressing book The Hobbit really was.
  4. There was a huge kerfluffle in the publishing world this week about a YA author who tried to run a Kickstarter campaign to complete a series her publisher ultimately dropped.  This led to a lot of rabid debate about the use of Kickstarters in conjunction with books.  These two posts by Marni Bates and Jane Litte (Dear Author) give pretty good summaries of both sides.  I have mixed opinions on the whole thing.  Kickstarter is NOT a platform I personally feel comfortable using as an author.  Part of that is worry that I’ll disappoint people or miss a projected deadline because life happened (a point Jane brings up in her post).  That’s one of the big reasons I like self publishing.  The deadlines are (largely) self-imposed and fluid if they need to be.  One of the other reasons I would be disinclined to use it as an author is that I can’t really think of any decent rewards (another point Jane makes that I agreed with).  A lot of the objection to Jay’s campaign was that she openly admitted that $7k of the $10k she was asking for would go to living expenses while she wrote the book.    Some people got pissy saying that Kickstarter was for a product, not for what amounts to salaries.  Other people then implied that first group of people were anti-author and didn’t believe that writers should get paid for their work.  The whole thing got ugly and Jay ended up issuing a public apology and closing the campaign before withdrawing from social media.  I personally am somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of a Kickstarter covering more than production costs.  That’s just where I stand on things.   Doesn’t mean I don’t think authors should get paid.  My issue relates to having a proven track record of PRODUCING (which was not an issue in Jay’s case but certainly is in a lot of the Kickstarter campaigns I’ve seen from authors over the years).   I would be a lot more inclined to fund a project from someone who has a proven reputation for putting stuff out because that alleviates some of the concern that I’ll never get what I paid for with the donation (which is a total possibility with Kickstarter).  I think C.E. Murphy’s Kickstarter campaign was the first one I saw that openly admitted the lion’s share of $ was going to living expenses while she wrote that I was like “Oh, yeah that makes sense.”  That’s my personal perspective and I’ll vote with my dollars (by not spending them).  Why more people couldn’t just leave it at that and let the fans who wanted to see the end of that series fund the campaign, I have no idea.  You don’t like something, don’t fund it.  End of story.
  5. I closed comments on my blog yesterday.  Here’s why.
  6. Also on my mind…one of the things I wanted to do this year was make a transition back to self-hosted WordPress for my website.  I currently have domain forwarding and a customization package with WordPress.com, which was much cheaper when I started that five years ago (like $20 a year).  But their costs keep going up, and I’d rather spend a little bit more for full freedom to do as I wish.  I finally figured out how to successfully merge both this website with my cooking blog–which I realized, um, is already called Pots and Plots and kinda already covers what I’m about.  I felt really dumb when it hit me.  I am getting back into food blogging but it’s not likely to be with more than one post a week (because, hello, LIFE), so it will well suit to a weekly feature.  I’m in design mode now.  Not sure when that will roll out, but I’m really excited.
  7. And in case you missed it…
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