Mother's Day

I didn't sleep last night. Really truly didn't sleep. I was still wide-awake at 4:17 at which time I resolutely stopped watching the clock. I was awake by 6:45. The mosquito flying around my room was the most persistent, determined and agile bug I have ever, ever encountered. At 4AM, I decided maybe there was more than one. Maybe there were two. Or five. Or ten. But my bed was not littered with dead mosquito bodies when the room finally got light, so I'm thinking not -- just one seriously hard-working little pest. I actually told it -- yes, out loud -- that I didn't care if it bit me 100 times if it would just stop whining around my ear. It did not listen. I suppose mosquitoes don't really speak English.

Anyway, Mother's Day. I can't remember last year's Mother's Day but I wish we'd done something special. I wish I'd bought my mother flowers and written her a sappy card and cooked her a fancy dinner. I don't think I did. I told a therapist last summer that I didn't think I'd have any regrets: my relationship with my mother was strong and loving and friendly. She was, in so many ways, my closest friend. She was the person I called when I felt good and when I felt bad, or when I needed advice about cooking or cleaning or health or shopping. She was the person I did things with -- Saturday morning garage sales and shopping for clothes or shoes. I talked to her more often and about more than anyone else in my life. But we never did much to celebrate Mother's Day. She knew I loved her and I knew she loved me. I think I felt -- and I think she felt -- that the way we lived was a regular recognition of how important and special our relationship was and that I didn't need one day a year to tell her she was wonderful. But I do regret -- so much -- that I don't have a special memory from last year to make this year more bearable.

My sister's kids sent me chocolate-covered strawberries. My delightful son brought me tea in bed, and an omelet, and a bagel -- not just one breakfast but two. Today, we're going to see The Avengers together -- it's the first time, we've gone to a movie together since . . . ugh, I wanted to say years, but actually, we went to the movies together on the day my mom died. We needed a distraction. I suppose that's what today's movie is, too.

Today would probably be easier if I'd slept last night.

Blogging about blogging

I open the door to the outside and Zelda dashes through like I'm rewarding her for being incredibly clever while Gizmo looks at me like, "Really? Must we?" I love having two dogs around -- it is decidedly twice as much fun as one.

But that wasn't what I was going to write about. Obviously, having quit graduate school (or descended into total insanity, depending on how you'd like to define my behavior), I'm trying to figure out what I do next with my life. Or rather, how I earn the money that it will take to pay the mortgage and feed the kid and the dog and keep the car filled with gas...I should stop this list before it freaks me out. But you get the idea -- I need to come up with a plan. I think I wrote about my OCD need for plans before: ah, no, it was about structure. Here, read this past post: Structure. So you see, I need some structure, I need some goals, I need to know what the f*** I'm doing. (Look, I'm so repressed that I can't even swear on my own blog that no one else reads! Gah! Sometimes my crazy drives  me...ha, crazy.)

Returning to the point . . . most writer's blogs strike me as wrong. Not that I'm going to go out and tell them so, but writers seem to mostly write about writing. Admittedly, when that's what you're doing, of course it's what interests you. And yet, readers -- who are the people who should be most inclined to visit a writer's blog -- don't care about writing. In fact, as a reader, I want nothing less than a writerly blog written by my favorite authors. I want to believe that Miles Vorkosigan is real. I don't want to know how Lois McMaster Bujold thought about acts while she wrote those novels and how she deliberately used short sentences to build tension. I want to believe in the world she created -- a blog about writing from her would be like Oz pulling back the curtain and saying eagerly, "yeah, it's all tricks, you want to try, too?"

Yet, of course, when you're writing, that's what you're thinking about. I've written a bunch of posts about the business of self-publishing because that's what I'm thinking about, but I don't want to write a blog about self-publishing because that would require me to keep writing about it past the point when it interests me. In fact, having a successful blog in general probably requires consistency -- writing about the same topics regularly -- and wow, does that sound tedious or what? I really would rather just blog whatever weird thing is in my head at whatever time it's in there. (They're remaking the Star Trek with Khan and no movie has ever given me worse nightmares -- I'm horrified by the very idea. I won't be seeing that one. Not that I see any movies, but that one I won't be wanting to see and not because of all the reasons that leaving the house seems like a bad idea...And yeah, that thought's because of those weird little ear worms that eat your brain.)

Anyway, I think my conclusion is that I'm not likely to ever have a successful blog. Okay, cross blogging off as one possible future career. Time to go back to writing and not thinking about our eventual starvation . . .

Pricing experiment

I'm trying to force myself to make my pricing experiment last through the weekend. I said I was going to try it for a week and it's not a real experiment unless one follows the rules. But so far a .99 price is decidedly not worth it. I've sold more copies, but I've made so much less money. In a month to month comparison, the first five days of April, I sold 42 copies and made probably $100. In the first five days of May, I've sold 56 copies and made just under $20. So yes, people buy more at the lower price point, but nowhere close to the eight times as much needed to make it an equivalent value.

I think I just talked myself out of continuing my experiment for another two days. I'd have to sell 322 copies in the next two days to make the .99 price be a break-even price and that's so unlikely as to be laughable.So... time to change the price. Wow, I bet this was a fascinating post for anyone not interested in self-publishing (not!)

80% done

I'm at the place where I start to think that everything I'm writing is completely and utterly idiotic, the stupidest plot that anyone's ever come up with and miserably stilted to boot. Fortunately, I've now written enough long stories (admittedly, most of them fanfic) that I recognize the phase. Usually I hit it at closer to 30K words and this time I'm nearer 60K, so I guess that's a sign that I'm improving. With something, anyway. I'm trying hard to remind myself that my beta readers really liked Chapter 6 (the most recent chapter they've seen) so I'm doing something right even though everything I've written today is utter crap.

Assuming that I can keep writing through this stage -- a reasonably safe assumption, I usually do -- by the end of the week, Thought will be the longest story I've written this century. Not as long as the first version of the novel I once-upon-a-time almost finished, but pretty long. I'm not leaving myself as much time for editing, though, which ought to make me nervous -- ah, except that this time I've got beta readers working on it now and with Ghosts I waited until I finished. All right, so I won't get nervous about that. Yet, anyway.

Life changes*

I decided that since I can now live a schedule-free life -- which is a really strange and basically uncomfortable feeling -- I'd try to let my sleep patterns become natural and whatever they would be in a world that didn't include a 9-5 job or a class schedule and homework due dates. My guess was that I'd start staying up really late and waking up even later, but that seemed okay and even sort of fun to me. Apparently, however, that is not my body's natural sleep cycle and I feel silly a little for ever thinking it would be. Instead, I get tired when it gets dark, wide-awake when it gets light. I've been waking up at 5. In principle, I totally object. In practice, I really like walking the dog at 6:30 instead of 8:30. The world is peaceful and beautiful and no one is out except the herons and the squirrels and the ducks.

Unconnected to the sleep schedule, I seem to be becoming curmudgeonly. I feel a little young for it, but yesterday I read a review of a song -- yes, a song review -- and felt a strong desire to tell the author what an idiot he was. Then I read comments to a blog post about self-publishing and was halfway through writing a response that pointed out the total lack of logic in one comment when I came back to myself and closed the comment box. Next I saw a book cover and had to restrain myself from writing the author to tell him what he needed to fix on it. That one was frustrating because the author used a good photo with terrible typography. If he paid a designer, he should get his money back. I think I have to shut off my connection to the internet and take more walks, because curmudgeonly is not like me.

In book changes, I'm going to make the price on Ghosts .99 for a week, from May 1 to May 7. It's an experiment, mostly to prove to myself that it's a bad price point. I'd have to sell ten times as many copies in the first week of May as I did in the first week of April to make it seem worthwhile and I don't think that'll happen. But the only way to know for sure is to try it.

*I wrote this post mostly because while I walked I was thinking about words that were both nouns and verbs. In the title, I'm not sure which 'changes' is. I like that in a word. 

Insanity

I may have gone insane. Well, technically, I suppose I already am. The whole agoraphobia thing probably qualifies me, not to mention the depression and anxiety. But no, this is a different kind of insanity, one that's not listed in the DSM.

Hmm, you know, insane is not really a diagnosis. I wonder which disorders actually qualify as insanity and which are just issues? I guess that I will never find out because I am now a graduate school drop-out. Mostly, making the decision and acting on it left me feeling relieved and happy. Then yesterday -- the first day of the rest of my life -- I felt much less happy as I realized that I either have to take writing seriously as an income-generator or get a job.

I said as much to R in the car and he pointed out that if I started taking writing seriously, it would probably stop being fun. I swear, he's unreasonably wise for a person so young.

So for right now, I'm going to just have fun writing for a while and start worrying about getting a job when the money that we were living on while I went to graduate school starts to run out. And meanwhile I can hope that the money from writing will stretch that time. Today I posted the first chapter of Thought that I've written in a month. And yeah, it was fun.

A Gift of Thought

Have I finished writing the book? No. Should I really do that? Yes. But meanwhile, here's my current winner on the cover.

I'll want to add a blurb, once I finish writing the book and someone says something meaningful about it, but I think this cover walks a fine balance between connecting the book with A Gift of Ghosts, using color to emphasize the lightness, but also making it clear that this book is rather more of a thriller. The image is actually Union Station in Washington which -- if you're reading along on fiction press -- you'll know is a location used in the story. But even without knowing that, the columns say DC and a lot of the book is set there. And I liked the skew of the columns -- it fits the fact that it's a weird little story!

Hmm, it occurs to me that I don't know how easy it is to find me on fiction press. I mean, it's easy for me. But easy for anyone else? Well, here's a link if you feel like reading a rough draft in slow-motion: A Gift of Thought. If you do read it, leaving me reviews honestly does motivate me to write faster. Yes, it's a terrible external locus of validation problem but part of the fun of writing is knowing that other people are having fun reading!

Once I finish writing, I'll take the story down, so if you're reading this post in May or so and the link doesn't work, that's why.

Cover note: a small border around the background photo is really essential to give it proper definition. Without the border, the photo sort of floats and looks unfinished. The border's not even noticeable except in its absence.