STATUS: Monday, July 20th

The Daily Report

Pretty sure I mentioned this last week, but I just raised the prices on a bunch of my ebooks across the board. I want to go into my motives here. I look on everything I do as an experiment… even the parts of my schtick that work, could work better.

I tend to be a little squeamish and second-guessy when it comes to valuing my own work, but the way I see it, the prices on the e-books aren’t about what I think my work is worth or even what my readers think my work is worth, but about what’s going to catch The Crowd’s attention and convince them that it’s worth buying, which can come down to some counter-intuitive psychology. Basically, I’m looking for the exact intersection at which the most people are giving me the most money.

Anyway, I closed last week pretty well… had a real “back on the horse” moment where I went from struggling to get back into the swing of things to just swinging as effortlessly as ever. I know I confused at least one person by saying that I wasn’t at a very “dynamite” place in the story and then turning in the chapter I did. Well, that’s because after spending most of the day despairing over what I had to work with, I threw out what I was working on, came up with an entirely new and snappier direction, and wrote a brand new chapter in two hours.

That’s how it is sometimes. I spent two months trying and failing to do one thing while falling farther and farther behind, then decided to do something else and did it in two hours. Chalk up another mark in the “don’t keep trying to work with things that aren’t working” column.

Now I just have to keep it going. At the same time I posted on Friday, I changed the schedule tagline on the MU site to “Updates Fridays”. I’m planning on taking on a variation of my old four day writing cycle, but pegged to a weekly update schedule and with a day of slack built in. I’ll be talking more about this and the future of Tales of MU in later posts, probably this week. The short version is that I’m in the awkward position where Tales of MU brings in most of my money but doesn’t really “pay the bills” any more, and this state of affairs has been exacerbated by indecision about what to do about it… I have a hard time handling things in moderation, so trying to strike a balance where I’m giving MU *sufficient* energy without giving it all of my energy is tricky. But like I said, I’ll be working through that in more posts later on.

The State of the Me

I came into the weekend with a sleep deficit, and it was a busy weekend, and it was also as hot as a very hot weekend, so I’m feeling kind of beat today, hence starting this status post at 11 and posting it sometime after 12.

Plans For Today

Given my physical state, I’m dedicating today to brainstorming/creativity.