I didn’t get as much done this week as I would have hoped. I spent most of my time trying to figure out what to do with Onesong. At the moment, my timeline for the story covers two medium sized white boards, plus has about 10 pages of notes. I have the poor story in shambles, trying to get it all wrangled around to where it needs to be.

That’s not even mentioning my own internal angst about how much work this is and how much I have to go. I realize that this part of it is just my brain whining about it like a two-year-old child who would much rather be watching television than cleaning her room. Writing is so much easier than fighting through this slog and trying to get it all to make sense.

Which is only made worse by my own doing of posting a chapter here on this blog each week. (grin) This is what it’s like to write/edit a novel in public!

If you really want to hear my two-year-old self whine, remind it that it still need to do the same thing to book 5 in the Sacred Knight series. That pretty much sends her into full out temper tantrums.

That’s probably why she threw up an idea for a Loki novella this week. I did capture the idea, but I didn’t give into her wanting to get started on it right away. Ha ha! I win! (at least temporarily)

Also this week, I finished working on Alexander’s Den, sent it off to my first reader, and got it back with many more questions about how many more stories this one was going to open up. She saw way more possibilities in it than I did, so now I have double the ideas! She had some really cool ones. And I haven’t even gotten to read her comments on the story yet — these were just in her return email to me.

I got back to work on my Cupid story. I really do hope to have that one posted around Valentines Day, but we’ll see if I actually get it finished and where Onesong is at during that time.

Also this week was the annual Jerome Music Boosters Holiday Gift and Craft Fair. It was fun visiting with friends, both new and old.

I even started getting up about fifteen minutes earlier in the morning to try to get some drawing done. I kept having two lectures go through my head: 1) you can get anything done if you just spend 15 minutes a day working at it, and 2) you have got to schedule some time to work on your drawing.

How many times I have said the first one? All the bloody time! Especially here on this blog.

The second is a conversation I’ve been having with myself a lot recently. I kept wanting to do it in the evenings (for months now) and I keep never sitting down to do it. But I have been very diligent about working on my audiobooks first thing in the morning, so I started thinking about trying to spend 15-30 minutes on my drawing while I was waiting for my audio files to sync. I will not say that I’m successful yet because I only tried this over a couple days last week. It worked fine then, but I’ll have to see if it’s good for the long haul. I spent my time working on the illustrations for my kids books.

I also set up Patreon. If you aren’t aware, Patreon is a site that allows you to support creators making content with pledges as low as $1. Creators (including me) usually have different levels that you can support at. I’m trying to keep it simple right now, so I have only a few levels that are inexpensive, but have sweet rewards. I do plan on doing bonuses at the levels I have established right now, as well as developing more over time. Patreon supporters allow me to keep running my free fiction on my blog every week. Yes, I realize that I’d do it anyway. This just allows people to “tip” me for putting up my stories.

Please consider that I have already spent approximately 600 hours of my own time this year creating content — that is just writing my stories (For my fiction, I write an average of 17 words per minute, so 357,073 words divided by 1020 words per hour (17 words times 60 minutes = 1020) equals 350 hours) and working on my audiobooks (254 hours to date). That does not count my time at publishing my stories and all the formatting/cover design work that goes into them. Or the time that I do shows. Or posting blogs or website work, etc. The concept of supporting an artist to do their work is nothing new. Just consider that for $12/year (that’s $1/month — and $0.25/week with a couple free weeks!), you can say, “Yes, I enjoy the previews of the stories enough to help out.” If you want to pay more, you can even get early access to the story of the week. And, for only $1 above that previous level, you can have extended access to the story. Plus bonuses when I add them. If you can’t afford to donate, that’s fine. I’m not going to put the fiction behind a pay wall because I want people to enjoy my stories. Please continue to like and share the stories because that small effort on your part helps my work get discovered by other people who will enjoy it. But if you would like to make a contribution, it is very much appreciated.

 

Fiction words written last week: 3,334 words

Blogs/Newsletter articles/non-fiction written:  1,717 words

Writing month to date total:  39,164 words for November and 1,468 to start out December

Writing year to date total: 357,073 words

Drawing/painting last week: As I said above, I spend some time working on my kids books. I recolored three pages that I hated before and love them now. I inked and colored another page, and I think I was currently inking the next page. Only 26 more pages to go (or something like that).

Audio: Almost 5 hours of recording and editing audio. I feel like the audiobook for Quest for the Three Books is really moving along. It’s cool to see it coming together.