Alexandra Erin

I feel sorry for Stephanie Meyer.

…

That is all.

This is a response to a comment left on my previous post, about five days ago. I’m making it a separate blog post because the original post is a bit stale and I’d like to make sure it gets read. I’m not singling the author out for any negative reason… it’s a good comment and I’m sure it echoes the thoughts of some other readers.

Llama wrote…

Alright, so let me first say that I really love the fact that you write MU and More Tales of MU, and I am glad that we are able to support you as a writer with our donations. But I feel that we aren’t really getting our moneys worth. There is no job that I know of where you can work, “update”, 4 days a week. I could totally understand 5 days a week without a problem, but 4? It just seems a but ridiculous to me. And since you have dropped the MU updates to 4 days a week instead of 5 will you still be taking a week off every 3 months? Because updating 4 days a week is like only working 16 days out of the month. Just a few questions from a VERY loyal fan. [Please don’t harass me for my opinions we are all entitled to think what we will.]

Let me start by saying that some readers have actually been clamoring for me to reduce the official schedule. I always said that I’d rather aim for five and hit four on accident than aim for four, but after the month I had I saw the wisdom of this approach. I may argue with people, but I listen while I’m arguing, and I’m capable of being convinced.

What I was doing wasn’t working. It had worked in the past. It wasn’t working in the present. It therefore had to change. I would update everything seven days a week if I could… but I’d probably lose a few readers who just couldn’t keep up.

Will I still take a week off every season? Probably. I don’t know that I’ll be taking a separate one for the autumn, after all this. I’m almost certainly going to be taking a week off around Christmas. After that… well, you have to understand: this four day a week schedule is what I’m doing right now. I’m not going to make a prediction about what I’m going to be doing with regards to vacation time next spring based on how I’m working right now.

But let’s say I decide this four day schedule works out just ducky. Let’s say that once everything else in my life is back in order and I’m back on track with everything, I decide “You know, this really is the best. The extra breathing room is a huge help. It ain’t broke, why fix it?” And let’s say I decide that a week off to unwind is still a good idea.

Let’s say I do that. You don’t have to agree with that as a work ethic… but what would you do about it, as a reader?

See, most people who read Tales of MU are reading it for free… my purpose in updating so often is mainly to build exposures for ad revenue. This is why I like my ads. It’s a very fair system. The more I write, the more people read, and the more money I make. The average reader has to contribute nothing but their presence. It does have its downside: if I take a week off… my ads take a dip. So do my donations.

Oh, well. Everything in life is a trade off, isn’t it?

Speaking of trade-offs: you’re right, most jobs aren’t like mine. It’s a mistake to compare them. I did great at my last job… but when I left, they hired somebody else who did the same job satisfactorily. Now that I’m doin’ my own thing, I don’t have to worry about going in to work and finding out I’ve been laid off… but I also don’t get to wake up Friday morning knowing that there’s a fat ol’ paycheck waiting for me.

As a self-employed artist, my job is not “all or nothing” like most people’s. This gives me the freedom to experiment a little, with my schedule and with my rates. I can negotiate with the public at large instead of having to hunt for a job with a better wage. If I’m having a bad time of things, I can spend a little time spinning my wheels looking for traction and not get fired… but I still pay for it. My donations and ad revenue have both gone down during my period of decreased productivity. Not too much… but more than enough, from my point of view.

I was on target to hit my goal of 20,000 readers by year’s end. Now… well, my traffic has gone down and I’ve been using my Project Wonderful ad earnings as income instead of advertising budget. I’ve taken a giant leap backwards in the past two months. Whether I can turn things around depends on how many people come back when they see I’m updating more regularly again. Time will tell.

But even so, I’m still here. I’m still getting by. Even if I’m spending my advertising budget and charging a few things, I’m still here, and I’m bouncing back. Can I keep going with only four updates a week instead of five? Dunno. It’s not like I can ask the person who came here before me! I’ll find out, though… and if it turns out I can’t, well, I’ll change things around a bit more.

That’s pretty much the recurring theme of everything I’m doing: “I’m trying something new here.”

Whoo… been a while since I’ve posted here, hasn’t it?

Yes, I am alright. Thank you to everybody who’s been writing. It’s just been… hectic. My roommate wasn’t able to go back to work on a regular schedule until earlier this week, and we’re still adjusting. There’s been some bad news in my life… nothing earth-shattering, nothing that would necessarily make sense to everybody else. My insomnia’s been back, as bad as ever, and on top of that I’ve been having computer-related problems (including some fairly embarrassing PEBKAC errors that have cost me hours of work.)

If I were superstitious or easily discouraged, I’d think that Fate was out to get me… but of course, nothing happens in a vacuum. Obviously my insomnia’s going to get worse when my daily schedule is disrupted, and stress is only going to make it worse. Those three things, in fact, are pretty much a vicious cycle… and the more stressed and sleep-deprived I am, the more likely I am to mess things up when I’m computin’. So, no, not malign fate… just a couple of road bumps. I’m still here and I’m still plugging away.

As an aside, since it seems like you guys might read my blog more often than you check your emails: Quinn, Sonya, I need you guys to email me with your phone numbers. The only place I had them was my old phone, which is kaput.

My roommate was hoping to go back to work this week, but she’s still at home. It’s her job and her situation (and in a very literal sense, her business) so I’m not going into the details, but just so people don’t worry unduly I’ll say that the complications here are bureaucratic rather than medical. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for next week, because on top of making me busier with away-from-the-keyboard stuff, it’s just plain distracting to have somebody else in my “office” (meaning the apartment) all day, no matter how apologetic they are about it.

Here’s a fun fact: it only takes me two uninterrupted hours to write something like a Tales of MU chapter. If I have two hours alone at my keyboard with nothing else going on, I can write a 2500-3000 word story, no problem. It doesn’t have to be Tales of MU. It doesn’t have to be anything. I can take a starting sentence and just start writing. That’s how I got Tales of MU in the first place, actually. Long fight scenes and sex scenes sometimes take a bit longer. Heavy dialogue takes less time.

But, the key word there is “uninterrupted”. How long does it take me with, say, a five minute interruption somewhere in there? You might guess “two hours and five minutes”, and I wish that were the right answer. No, I don’t do something like erase everything and start over again from the beginning. I’m not that OCD. But it isn’t as simple a matter as coming back and picking up right where I left off… because there is no “where I left off.” I’m not following some detailed one hundred point plan, where I can go, “Okay, I left off at number 49 and so now I go onto number 50.” The stories I write don’t exist until I write them… I write one thing and then I write what happens next. How do I know what happens next? This is where writers talk about muses or their characters talking to them or whatever… I just do… at least, as long as I’m into the flow of the scene.

It takes me a while to get there, though, and once something knocks me out of it, I have to start that (getting into the flow) all over again. I usually have to do something like open a Notepad up and write a little bit of stream-of-consciousness or start playing with the last little bit I wrote, or go read and comment on something elsewhere, or whatever, to get myself re-warmed-up (I do this kind of thing in the morning right before I begin, too.)

Now, I can make myself “just crank it out”, as it were, in order to turn out the updates regardless of interruptions and regardless of whether or not I’m “in the scene.” There have been a few times in the past where I’ve done that. I’ve never done that without being called on it in comments the next morning and then rewriting the chapter heavily to bring it up to standards, though, so evidently this isn’t just some crazy artist thing in my head. Other people can tell the difference, too.

So, the long and the short of it is that all the little distractions add up to more than the sum of their parts. When I don’t update, it’s not that I can’t find enough time to write a chapter. It’s that I can’t find it in the chunks that I need. I have friends who are going to tell me I shouldn’t waste time or energy justifying or explaining all this. Of the webcomics I read, I think maybe two of them keep to their posted update schedules (not counting ones like Something*Positive that have cheerfully dispensed with all semblance of a schedule with no ill effects) and it hasn’t hurt their popularity.

Of course, I’m trying to build my audience… not just for MU but for my other works… so I’d love to not be in this situation right now. But it is what it is what it is, you know? I make do. Having somebody to share expenses with is quite often the difference between a “starving artist” and a “comfortably if modestly fed artist”… that’s about the most frequent advice established authors give to beginning ones, and for good reason… but having both of our work disrupted by this is putting us in a bit of a pinch. It isn’t an ideal situation for anybody.

Right now I’m more behind on ClassicTales of MU for the week, so I’ll break my usual order and write that first tomorrow and then try for More Tales of MU.