Business As Usual, Writing

Well, I haven’t updated this in a bit.  There’s a good reason too – most of my writing energy goes towards “Muse” these days.  And that’s a lot of energy.

Business isn’t good – which means it’s business as usual for these days.  I’m always scraping for gigs, and never coming up with quite enough.  I had a big one on the hook too – an nice $7k job.  Everything looked good, my contact was saying she was sure I had it… then they went with someone that the CEO or someone knew (and later I got an email from my contact that “they were already seeing that might have been a mistake”)

It’s enough to drive me crazy somedays.

But even with business being slow, life isn’t bad.  I’ve rather enjoyed the stuff I’ve done, and the projects have all been rather cool lately.  So that’s not bad.  The pro-bono job I did is leading to a very non-pro bono job here in the next couple of months, and the client is recommending me to others for more gigs.

And even with money tight, I still manage to get out a bit (I usually refer to that as “sanity” in my budget), though most of that is free (Monday night, for instance, was Beer and S’mores tweetup, and Tuesday I went and collected my free tea from Zoomdweebie’s)  So I’m not being a total shut in despite the budget woes.

Muse, Book 1, is almost done.  It’s definitely two books long.  And in a twist, I realized I saw an opening for more books if for some strange reason it should ever happen to be popular – and yes, it’s a nice logical reason within the plotline, not something I have to convolute to make it happen.  

But I really think Muse is going to be two books, and that’s all – I just can’t imagine it being something ‘big’.  It’s landscape is just too alien.  On the other hand, I’ll get to hear some interesting comments back from it – I’ve got a very limited pool of people I let read it as I write it (three at the moment), and one of them is a professor for interpersional communications and such.  Yes, I’ve got a PhD reading my stuff.  She’s a friend of mine that got curious what I was writing, so I gave her a quick lowdown on what the “landscape” of the book was – and she thought that was very cool, so I finally broke down and added her to my distribution list.  That should provide interesting feedback.

I’m also doing things a bit differently this time.  Last time I didn’t spend a lot of effort pimping The Story of Gamer Zone.  I wanted to do the writing, not the marketing, but it’s a necessity.  After it’s release, I did market it for a bit, but pulled back – I wanted it re-edited, and wanted to add a little more content to answer some questions that I was being asked.  So it’s setting at an Editor now being delt with.  But I started marketing Muse early this time.  I always Tweet / echo on Facebook when I’m writing.  THis starts garnering Likes, comments, and messages in my In Box curious what I’m writing.  I send out what I call the ‘teaser’ – it’s the very first section of the first chapter of book 1.  That’s enough to get people watching me.  At the same time, I cranked up my involvement in Mafia Wars – in that game, ya gotta add to your friends list to add to your Mafia.  So I started using the pimping service to bring the number of friends on Facebook up (I’m at exactly 1,000 while I write this).   

I filter the shit out of people, obviously – I couldn’t possibly keep up with 1,000 status updates.  But part of them aren’t filtering me – so I’m slowly getting more and more response to my status updates.

Sure, it’s one – on – one marketing, but if I can get some buzz of any sort going with minimum effort, hell yeah I’ll do it.  It will be months before “Muse” Book 1 is done with Editing, so I’ll use Book 2, then “Villain” to keep people attracted to what I’m doing until the release.   Hey, I didn’t say it was an awesome plan, just a low-effort plan 🙂

OH, and I mentioned before that my writing speed has increased.  Well, it’s leaped up a bit more.  Over the weekend I wrote 65 pages in two days.  No, that’s not “write all day”, that’s six hours one day, two hours the next.

I did the math on that.  If I could do 45 pages a day, I could write novels in 7 – 10 days.  Now that would be awesome.  Of course, I can’t do that everyday – I’ve got to do things like, oh, make money.  Would be wonderful if I could do this all day though.  I’ve really come to enjoy the writing thing, and I’ve got enough stories to tell for a while (well, unless I really do start writing 70k – 90k novels once a week.  Then I’d run out in a few months. 🙂