If we were having coffee, we’d be talking Star Wars. There’s little or nothing else to talk about. I’ll be seeing The Force Awakens Friday afternoon– granted, after many people have seen it already (oh, were I just younger; I spent three days waiting in line outside in costume for Phantom Menace tickets, and there were widespread roars of delight when it was reported that the then-fledgling-technology MoviePhone was crashed as hell) but I have a kid now and that means I don’t get to go to late evening shows on weeknights anymore.
But: there are six days until I get to see a new Star Wars movie, and given what Disney plans to do to the franchise this is probably the last time that that feeling will ever get to be special. I’m honestly kind of surprised that there isn’t a trailer ready for Rogue One yet. Six days is a rather convenient number, as there are also six Star Wars movies and I’ll be watching one a day until I see the new one. Hopefully sometime over winter break we’ll be taking the boy to see it; I’m still concerned that it’s going to end up being too scary for him, and that’s one of the few ways in which the film could end up genuinely disappointing me, because I’m really invested in taking my son to see his first movie soon, and that movie needs to be Star Wars.
I’m trying to decide exactly how much I need to be restricting my internet access this week. I haven’t been avoiding spoilers, particularly, but I have decided that I know enough about the movie and don’t really need to know or see any more until I see it. Wanton theorizing with friends is fine, but I don’t want to know any more and so I’ll probably need to be turning the computer off and writing some posts early toward the end of the week.
How about you? You’re going to see the movie, or you wouldn’t be having coffee with me. Any big preparations for Star Wars?
This, much like my blogwanking posts, will be of some interest to a handful of you, but the rest of you may end up wanting to skip it.
I’m at about the 40% mark on Sunlight, just underneath it, in fact. And when you count snippets of later parts that I’ve already written (the final scene is done, for example) the bit that I’m at is probably right at the 1/3 mark of the actual book. I’ve gotten the action in Sunlight moving a lot faster than Skylights did; a slow start is one of the more common criticisms of that book and I wanted to make sure that dangerous/scary shit was happening to my characters much more quickly this time.
I’ve hit a stall point, though, and I suspect I won’t be adding to the word count for a little while, and part of the reason I won’t be adding to the word count is because of the way I write. I don’t do multiple drafts. I write a thing, and then I take another tinkering/editing pass at it– correcting grammar and typographical errors, fixing clunky sentences, occasionally adding short scenes or deleting others (most frequently when I realize that characters have a conversation in Chapter 6 that they just had in Chapter 5, because by the time I got to Chapter 6 I’d forgotten they had it) and all that, but rarely the type of large-scale modification that I’d call a full-blown draft. I know I’ve called that phase “second draft” in the past, but it really isn’t. It’s mostly cleanup.
Once the book is out of first draft, it’s basically done. This isn’t because I have such supreme confidence in my writing process that I think I’m perfect. It’s because my first draft is so slow, and so roundabout and circular. It’s because sometimes I go two weeks and don’t write a single word, because I’m stuck on the next scene and I can’t write it if it’s wrong. While I tell other people “just do it, and fix it in second draft,” I can’t actually write that way myself.
I finally figured something important out about writer’s block: it’s not that I can’t write. It’s that what I’m about to try and write is wrong. So my brain won’t even let the wrong stuff come out of my fingers.
I’m at a point in this manuscript where, if I do this wrong, Sunlight will end up just basically being a remake of Skylights, and that’s really not what I want. The stakes need to be higher in this book, and they need to be higher in a way that I haven’t quite wrapped my head around, and the structure of this book needs to be different than the first book. And I’m at the point where those raised stakes need to be made clear quickly. So until I figure this out, I get to sit and stare at a blank screen, because I can’t write another word until I know what the right ones are.
We’ll start with books, since there are fewer graphs. As always, you’ll have to click to make this giant sumbeesh legible:
So: 533 downloads or print purchases, making November the second-best month of the year, behind only September’s 553. 37 sales over Starbase Indy, which was nice. Now, granted, most of those were free downloads, not paid, but I think by this point I have ample evidence that the giveaways are bumping print sales, too– and as I’ve demonstrated several times, my books sell better on KDP Select than they do when I spread them out. (As always: want one of my books in a format other than Kindle? Email me. We’ll figure something out.) On top of that, I had close to 3000 KENP pages, which don’t make me much money– that’s probably another 15-17 bucks– but it ain’t nothing, either. I still don’t much like the KENP model, but I do like being able to look at that graph and go “Man, somebody’s reading my book right now.” That’s kinda cool.
So yeah. I’d prefer for a much higher percentage of my books to be paid sales, but for the moment we’re focusing more on getting my name out there, and since the giveaways are helping sales, I’m going to call this a win.
Now. Let’s talk about that Syria post. Which I’m starting to refer to as “the goddamn Syria post” in conversation. It’s been hugely successful, at least by my standards, and it has done so by utterly screwing my data collection efforts. Remember when I was saying I was hoping for 100K hits this year? Yeah:
200K this year looks pretty likely at this point. I’ve had well over 100K unique visitors, although, weirdly, Likes and comments aren’t close to where they were last year.
My monthly graphs have become trendless.
And look at this bullshit. I was doing around 300 pageviews a day, 450 on a good day, before that post was written. My best day was just over 1000 views, on one of my Freshly Pressed days. Now I’m waking up (I’m writing this at 8:55 in the morning) to just under 1000 hits depending on the day and the post is sine waving. It’ll be interesting to see if it rebounds again; that previous dip corresponds nicely with Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The high day? Just north of 12,500 pageviews, and at one point I was getting 797 hits an hour.
The overall total, which includes December:
So I solved my “I’d like to have 100K views this year” problem by writing a post that will have 100K views all by itself by the end of the week. Also:
The big driver of all the traffic continues to be Facebook; Twitter doesn’t seem to be too shabby either from the number of notifications I get each day but it’s nowhere close to 34K and that number stopped loading for me a while ago. I got a brief burst of interest from Reddit one day but that went away (just a couple hundred hits) and Google+ is actually proving it exists.
I shut comments off at 122, at which point people started emailing me. Emails have ranged from short and supportive to multi-page copy and paste monsters with multiple fonts and multiple colors. Hitting Delete in Gmail is so easy, guys. Don’t bother, please. Oh, and my Likes on my Facebook page have soared, from 150 to close to 200 since the post was written.
Now I just need to find a way to make this replicable.
If we were having coffee, it’s pretty likely that my inner misanthrope (who is not always as “inner” as he should be, let’s be honest here) would be on full display. This has been a flatulent, flabby nothing of a week for me, and I’ve either been lazy as hell after an extremely busy Thanksgiving week and Black Friday weekend or showing symptoms of clinical depression or very possibly both. There’s been a panic attack or two, and oh, I managed to get turned down for like seven different jobs this week. One job turned me down twice! One of the two “nope, not you” emails specifically referenced that they were looking for candidates who more closely fit the job requirements.
The job: mortgage closing agent. The requirements: no experience, associate’s degree. I am deep into a trap here, kids; I am not (on paper) qualified to do anything other than teach, despite being a versatile motherfucker with a ton of different skills who would be perfectly cromulent at a wide variety of different jobs. So most jobs that are roughly equivalent to my current level of responsibility and pay require years of experience doing shit that I know how to do and I am capable of doing but do not have because I’ve been teaching instead. For other jobs, they look at my resume and see someone who is clearly pushing forty if not there already and highly educated to boot (I have two Master’s degrees) and refuse to even talk to me because they assume, hell, I don’t know what they assume, but I’m unclear on the reason why someone would think I couldn’t do a job that asks for no experience and an associate’s degree. The pay was even good! What the hell?
So, yeah. I’m at the point where I really need someone I know to go “hire this guy.” The problem is everyone I know in town is a teacher, and I love y’all but teaching jobs is not what I need right now. I did have one guy recommend me to his boss, and I applied for an open job, and he emailed me about salary requirements, but upon seeing what he was offering and realizing that there was absolutely no way I was going to make it through an interview where I’d need to pretend to be enthusiastic about training people to use insurance software we sort of both mutually declined to interview.
Which is probably desperately stupid on my part, because broke. But that really was a job that I would be likely to flee at the earliest opportunity.
And I haven’t figured out how I get through the part of the job-search process where they contact my current employer and he says “Oh, that guy? We forgot he existed, he hasn’t been at work since September.” And, believe me, I had a couple reminders this week about why.
Sigh.
True fact: Neither of my eyes are actually closed in this picture.
I might change the conversation to beards after a while. I’m growing my winter beard in at the moment, and it entertains me how every time I shave a beard off the next one grows in different. This one– also something that won’t help me during a job interview, I suspect– is coming in Full Hobo, and my current look is not one that’s going to make “no, he’s not diagnosable with depression at all” be a thing people say about me.
It actually looks a lot cleaner than it is in that photo. I’d get the camera closer but then WordPress would probably shut the blog down for obscenity and this is really my only lifeline at the moment. I can’t pull off that mid-twenties pretty guy 5 o’clock shadow look, so my only hope is to let it grow until it’s long enough to not look shabby, and we are in Utter Shabby at the moment.
After all that fun shit if you were still bothering to sit near me I might start discussing stories. I had this weird half-hallucinatory falling asleep process last night– not drug-induced, I promise; this was created by comfy— and I came up with like a dozen new stories to write, several of which I still remember and have dutifully dumped into my Loose Ideas folder in Wunderlist. Other than the #FridayFictioneers piece I got no fiction of any kind written last week, and I’ve legitimately got more on my plate than I can handle at the moment, so it was kind of weird that my brain spent a couple hours tossing “This! And this! And THIS!” at me. Maybe, brain, when I’m sitting in front of a computer websurfing forhours and pretending to write, you let me work on one of those several stories?
Crazy. I know.
No one’s ever having coffee with me again, are they?
Also: I love you guys, but do me a favor and refrain from trying to cheer me up/offering messages of support in comments. My brain is weird. Venting about this shit on my blog is how I deal with it, and heartfelt “It’s going to get better, we promise!” types of messages, for some reason, frequently somehow actually make the depression and anxiety worse, for reasons that are not at all clear to me. Make fun of me. Yell at me for being whiny. Believe it or not, the way my brain works, that’ll actually be BETTER.
Oh, and if you happen to be in northern Indiana and need an employee, maybe tell me that too.
Why November Wankery 1? Because chances are there’s going to be another one, maybe later today, maybe not, about sales and traffic. Because the great thing about getting 12K pageviews in a day is that I am under no obligation whatsoever to be interesting to anyone other than me.
So. Yeah. Starbase Indy.
That went… well?
Much like InConJunction, what is not in question is whether I had a good time. I definitely did. I enjoy these things, although the fact that for the second con in a row I was sitting near some very fun people definitely didn’t hurt. I sold a lot more books this time, 36 in total, which unfortunately still wasn’t quite enough to pay for both the hotel room and the table. I think in the future I need to focus on conventions in towns where I can stay with friends, or when I’m back in Indianapolis I need to drop the idea of staying at the convention hotel and find the nearest cheap La Quinta Inn or something like that. There’s only so many times I can go to these things and lose money; exposure’s fun, but you can die from it.
But. That exposure.
The following things happened: did I tell the story at InCon about giving my very last customer a free copy of Sanctum, and telling him that if he liked it, to find me at the next con and buy something? Well, if I didn’t, that happened.
He wasn’t the first person at my table, but he was probably second or third. Sadly, that’s as good as the story gets– he had a terribly apologetic look on his face and told me that Sanctum was literally the next book on his TBR shelf and he hadn’t gotten to it yet. Which, dude, I’m a reader, that’s fine. I’ve got a book by Salman Rushdie on my shelf that’s been waiting at least that long. If I can make Salman Rushdie wait, you can make me wait. Point is, he came over and talked to me about my books some more.
More fun? This happened. Not only did these folks begin the conversation with “I follow you on Twitter” and not only did they buy a book, they took my picture and blogged about it. Like I’m some sort of interesting person or something like that. Which was insanely awesome.
Also insanely awesome: getting interviewed by these folks on Day 3. As far as I know the podcast/video with the interview in it isn’t up yet, but I will of course link to it immediately once it is. And I’ve got a card from another guy who wants to do an interview at some point but didn’t have recording equipment with him.
None of these things happened at InCon. Which is not a slam on InCon, as it was my first convention, but holy hell did I feel more like an author and less like some sort of poseur at this one.
So, yeah. The con went well. Next up is C2E2, which despite my earlier griping I managed to find a way to send money to (and which I will almost certainly lose more money at) and the next one is either PenguiCon, which is right by my aunt’s house, or IndyPopCon in June. We’ll see.
So I spent all weekend being “on,” and as a result I have been home and very much “off” for the last couple of days. Luckily for me, That Post has been resurging again for the last couple of days and so it’s not like I’ve been starving for traffic.
This, much like my blogwanking posts, will be of some interest to a handful of you, but the rest of you may end up wanting to skip it.
So I spent all weekend being “on,” and as a result I have been home and very much “off” for the last couple of days. Luckily for me, That Post has been resurging again for the last couple of days and so it’s not like I’ve been starving for traffic.
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