THE DAILY REPORT
Yesterday was a pretty kick-awesome writing day, with a word count for fiction in excess of 3,000 words, split about evenly between new project Making Out Like Bandits and Tales of MU. While I am happy with my output, I did not quite accomplish everything I wanted to yesterday (I’d hoped to finish the MU chapter, and there’s a charity project I need to wrap up my contribution to). It took me longer than I’d expected to get into the swing of things during the day. Fatigue and soreness took their toll.
This morning, I dealt with phone nonsense this morning. It was firmly in the “don’t wanna” column the whole time, but… had to. The general flakiness was getting worse, the habit of getting caught in a battery-draining reboot cycle went from “every once in a while” to “daily” to “several times a day”. After looking at the options, I decided against filing an insurance claim to pay $50 for what would likely be a refurb when I was a month away from my contract’s end, when I’d planned on upgrading… and which I now realize is also my next travel time (it’s the 3rd of July, and we’re spending that weekend with my family).
Non-writing-wise, yesterday, I took stock of where I want to be with the Tales of MU schedule. I feel like I could be doing three times a week, but I also feel like I need to have some reserve capacity. I would also like to be able to offer my MU patrons a premium like seeing the chapters a bit early, which is easier to do if I’m writing two a week versus three (and might give me a better chance to catch slip-ups like “father” for “mother” in the chapter last week, before they go live for the whole audience). I’m still going back and forth about whether to operate that way. I expect I’ll decide next week. Either way, it’s going to be a Tuesday/Thursday update schedule for the time being.
FINANCIAL OUTLOOK
I took the money I expected to spend filing an insurance claim and instead bought a budget offbrand smartwatch. I might regret that, but I’ve been missing the functionality on phone of having a window-view case thing that let it function like a pocket watch, and the options for my new phone in that area are not appealing. I’ve never seen myself as a “smartwatch person” (and was never much of a “watch person”, back in the day), but as the kind of outfits I wear don’t tend to have much in the way of pockets, it can be tedious to dig my phone out to check the time or other simple information requests. I’m also trying to get more into the habit of accessorizing, and having a functional accessory I wear every day seems like a good way to make that work.
I’m trying not to be discouraged that my Patreon total is basically just sitting there. I have been doing not much with it in any kind of organized fashion for basically a couple of years now, and I’m only a week into my first month of actual operations. Yesterday I re-wrote the page to make it more clear what I’m offering, and I also added a patron-only story installment. I’ve been telling myself that there will be a spike of interest when I get my first new short story up later in the month, and again when I do my first monthly zine. I’m honestly not sure what I’ll do if there’s not. Something different, obviously. Just not sure what.
I think it’s something like this: I can get people very interested in supporting individual things I do. I feel like if I created different funding platforms where it’s: “Give me $1 a month for queer romance.”, “Give me $1 a month for political discourse.”, etc., I’d have a lot more people giving me a dollar a month. But if I say, “I do all these things. Give me $1 a month to support any or all of them.”, that’s less compelling. It’s a perception problem, basically. When I was teasing Making Out Like Bandits, I had people tell me in so many words they’d pay money to read that; so far, as near as I can tell, no one has. Because instead of a button that says, “Pay money to read this.”, there’s one that says, “Pay money to support this author and you can read many things.” I don’t know how to solve this, but neither do I have the time or energy or unique email addresses to create an individual Patreon for all the individual things I do.
I mean, the zine thing might change that. Pulling together everything I do and packaging it might make people go, “Ohhhhhhhhh. All this in a month, for $1? Sign me up!” But I need my month’s content for that to happen. So I’m trying to be patient and not give up on the model before I’m able to launch it properly.
I really am in better financial shape as of this month and next month than in preceding months. But not where I want to be, nor where I expected to be.
The State of the Me
A little lingering fatigue. Not much. I slept well last night.
Plans For Today
Have a chapter of Tales of MU to finish and post. Between having some errands to run and business-business to take care of (the phone thing, ordering new business cards), I’m not planning on doing much else, creatively, today.