STATUS: Thursday, November 17th

The Daily Report

Well, I’ve been trying to get back to fiction writing here. My problem is that I’ve been doing it by opening up my NaNo novel, which was going pretty well right up until the week of the election. I figured I’d take a few days off from it to deal with the jitters—I was ahead of schedule—and then come back to it. Well, the jitters didn’t end on Tuesday the 8th, and every time I open up the file, I come back to the last line I wrote, which is a question, in dialogue:

“How fares the Republic?”

It’s a dark joke in a time of dark jokes.

Speaking of dark jokes, though, on Tuesday I did have a bit of a breakthrough when someone replied to one of my threads to say that at least Trump wouldn’t have “Crooked Hillary” to blame any more. I joked that he’d probably have a doll on his desk that he’d yell at when things go wrong, and that turned into a whole new thread, which is now available in an expanded short story form as “Crooked Hillary: A Trumped-Up Tale Of Terror“. It’s currently available in a pay-what-you-will with no minimum (as low as zero, so you can get and read it for free) form here: https://sellfy.com/p/yQGe/.

At the end of business day, I’ll be putting a minimum price on it as part of being able to add it to the big ebook stores at their best royalty rates, so, if you don’t have the change to spare, get it while it’s free?

While it’s not exactly getting away from the topic of the election and politics, I’m optimistic that a logjam has burst and I’ll have an easier time with more fantastic fiction, going forward.

Financial Outlook

Mixed indications. The change in administration may well affect government spending that affects the contracts that go out in a way that may well affect employment in my immediate household in the near to medium future (reminder that it’s neither just people on direct benefits or government employees who suffer when the government slashes spending). My own income is creeping upwards, but not fast enough to compensate for that, and there’s no guarantee that will continue if things get tougher for the below-upper-classes.

I’m interested in landing more opinion writing work, as that pays pretty well. I’m still learning the ropes of pitching (it’s really great when editors come to me and say they want something, takes the pressure off), though, and in the meantime I’ve been taking a more direct approach of crowdfunding my own op-ed pieces on Twitter. Don’t know how long that will be sustain momentum, as the resulting pieces somehow never attract as much attention or are as widely-read as the viral threads that get me the attention necessary to do the crowdfunding. There’s a gap that has to be bridged there and I’m not 100% sure how to do that.

The State of the Me

Complicated.

Plans For Today

I’m easing off of trying to return to my NaNo novel (finishing it in November is probably a wash at this point), and will be working on writing other things this afternoon.