Month: December 2016

Why I don’t like goals

Lynn

I’ve been thinking about goals and habits and systems again. I’ve talked about those things many times in the past, and I have continually chased goals and failed to meet the vast majority of them. I’m really getting tired of failing.

A forum post I read today talked about how binary the whole goal mentality is: succeed or fail. Sure, you can play mind games with yourself and try to remember that you haven’t actually failed if you’ve made progress, but… really? When you set a goal, if you don’t reach it, your brain is going to tell you you’ve failed. And too much failure definitely takes a psychological toll.

Just yesterday I had a talk with my son about how I’d made 2016 sound like my worst year for writing since I’d started publishing. But it wasn’t. It was very close to an average year, and better even than 2014.

2012: 146,821
2013: 268,191
2014: 217,641
2015: 250,011
2016: 220,017

The monthly averages show how close those numbers really are:

2012: 24,470
2013: 22,349
2014: 18,137
2015: 20,834
2016: 18,335

But it felt like a terrible year, all the way around, because I had set such large goals at the beginning of the year and I came nowhere near reaching them. 2016 was the year I tried to write 1,180,000 words in 12 months; it was the year I decided 4,558 was a reasonable number of words to expect from myself most days.

Looking back, I have no idea what I was thinking.

Smashwords is finally about to start paying monthly

Lynn

Some good news from Smashwords to end the year:

Smashwords Plans for 2017

In broad strokes, below is what you can expect from Smashwords in the coming year.  If some of this looks familiar to our goals for 2016 (most of which we met), it’s because some of these items below will remain persistent themes for us for many years to come:

  • Faster payment cycles – January will be our last quarterly payment round, after which Smashwords is going monthly starting in February.  Yay!

Yay is right. I distribute to Apple through Smashwords, although the day might come when I’ll decide to buy a Mac and go direct (or Apple will finally get a clue and realize they should stop making it so difficult for authors to publish on their platform!) and I sell a few books through OverDrive and LibraryDirect and from the Smashwords’ store itself.

After the mess with All Romance Ebooks, I’ll be glad—ecstatic really—to finally be receiving monthly payouts from all the distributors/retailers I use.

Links and a comment about All Romance Ebooks

Lynn

This morning I spent a bit of time reading up on the All Romance Ebooks closing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but I’ve decided to ignore the settlement offer of .10 on the dollar for the $780 I’m owed. On the other hand, I’m still undecided* if I’ll bother pursuing the issue, because I know how that will interfere with my ability to concentrate on what’s important to me in 2017. The world is full of thieves, but it’s also full of really good people, and I just don’t know that I have time to bother with the thieves for that amount of loss. If it had been more money, my reaction I’m sure would be different. But I admit to a feeling of apathy about the money, and maybe that’s a sign that I really do need to concentrate on other things for the moment.

Besides, by not taking the settlement, until or unless ARe goes into bankruptcy, they’ll continue to owe me that money and I’ll continue to be able to go after it at a later date.

Here are some links related to the issue:

December 31, 2016 (Kristine Kathryn Rusch @ Patreon) Business Musings: All Romance Ebooks & Visions of The Future: Part One

December 30, 2016 (Writer Beware) All Romance eBooks’ Sudden Closing: Many Questions, Few Answers

December 30, 2016 (BlogCritics) Court Documents Regarding All Romance E-Books’ Disturbing Business Practices Surface

December 29, 2016 (BlogCritics) Publisher All Romance Ebooks: Closing Hits New Low In Stealing From Authors

December 28, 2016 (The Digital Reader) All Romance eBooks is Shutting Down (I’m the unattributed quote! I don’t remember ever being quoted before, so that’s funny.)

December 28, 2016 (Romance Writers of America) All Romance eBooks Closing Dec. 31

In several comments and articles, people mention the site being down, but I haven’t had any problems getting into ARe’s website. The first day there was a bit of slowness, but it has come up every time for me since. And of course, I downloaded my spreadsheet of sales the moment I received the email and it matched the monthly reports I download, so nothing had changed for me as some people have reported happening to them. In fact, I’ve just gone and made a screenshot now and it still shows the same amount due.

If I come across any more interesting news about it, I’ll update this post instead of writing a new one.

*In the time since I posted this, I’ve decided to accept this loss and move on. I just don’t believe I’ll ever collect enough to make it worth my time or energy to even try. Now that 2017 is here, I’m turning my attention to making 2017 an awesome year for my writing and my income.

Getting back to work

Lynn

Headache is better today. Now I need to get back to my writing.

I’ve been hoping I would write if I didn’t have a plan other than my 2,000 words a day goal and took some time off from the timers. But so far nothing is happening. Maybe because of holidays and being sick so I’m not going to give up on it yet. I’m tempted, mind you, but I’m not doing it. It’s time to settle in for a longer experiment with this and see what happens.

On that note, I’m going for lunch, then getting started on something. My list of things I want to do today is significant. I won’t get to them all, but it’d be nice if I got to some of them, and still wrote my 2,000 plus words today.

Changes coming to categories and tags

Lynn

It’s about time for my annual sweep up of categories and tags on this blog. I haven’t figured out a better system for organizing my many posts yet, but as soon as I get a good idea, I’m going to make some changes. I really hate the current arrangement of categories and tags. They just don’t work well at all for me!

Update: I’ve started making changes. They’re small so far, but more are coming.

Update the second: I think I’ve decided to let the old posts rest as they are, updating them as I feel like it, and go forward with the changes I want. That’ll mean a bit of a mess, but not too much of one. :)

The new year… I’m not ready!

Lynn

Well, back in mid-December sometime, I decided I was going to get myself to 2,000 words a day and stick there so I’d be all ready for the new year and my goal of 2,000 a day. :o

Then the holidays came. Then I got sick. I felt better yesterday, but stuff happened and I ended up doing other things (necessary things, actually). Today I don’t feel so well, because the headache is more present today, and I found out my phone lines were down after a storm yesterday evening. I hadn’t noticed because I hadn’t tried to call anyone and my DSL internet service was still working, although it was acting up a bit.

So, another derail. And as I’m typing this, my connection is gone again. I assume it’s the repairman still trying to fix things. He’s been at it for a while now, because the outage isn’t just with my house; there are several houses in the area that are out according to him.

Still, I think I can drum up the energy to get back to writing today. Only, what I really feel like doing is working on a plan for 2017. Or taking a nap. I could really use a nap right now.

Anyway, all that’s just to say I’m not ready for the new year. I barely got into this one.

All Romance Ebooks is closing, and despite losing money I’m owed, I’m not that sad about it

Lynn

As a general rule, I prefer to not spend a lot of my time letting negative thoughts go round and round in my head, mostly because I tend toward obsession and I don’t want to obsess over negative thoughts!

So here are some not so negative things about the All Romance Ebooks closing.

I’m going to shave anywhere from 1 to 3 hours off my total publishing time for every book I publish.

  • 5 to 10 minutes to make a wider cover (1:1.5 vs. 1:1.6) that I have to shrink to 200 x 300
  • 30 to 60 minutes formatting a copy of my master book file for PDF
  • 5 minutes to generate a custom sized cover image for the PDF file (because I always forget to export this image when I’m exporting my usual sizes)
  • 10 to 20 minutes importing my EPUB from Jutoh into Calibre, making some tweaks, and exporting as a MOBI
  • 30 minutes actually publishing the files to ARe

If there are issues, or I get caught up in what I’m doing, all these things can take longer. :)

And now I don’t have to do any of those things!

I need only EPUB files and my Word file for everywhere else. Smashwords uses doc files instead of docx, but I use the same file, make a quick save as doc, add one line to note it’s the Smashwords edition, and save again. I do nothing else to my file for Smashwords.

So getting rid of ARe is a real boon to my process.

One more vendor who pays only quarterly is gone.

I hate having to deal with payments like that in my sales spreadsheet, because it’s monthly, and ARe is always off by pennies and I have to make adjustments that annoy me because they aren’t right.

My cover design process just got easier!

I don’t have to worry about making my covers wide enough for the 1:1.5 200 x 300 covers I needed for ARe.

I’ve been designing my covers to the 1:1.6 ratio from the beginning and I like them. That size looks best to me on all my differently sized reading devices and apps, but I always had to make the 1:1.5 covers for ARe because I couldn’t stand stretching the covers and making them look misshapen.

In fact, I’m thinking about using this opportunity to revisit my cover template.

I’m pretty happy about all these things, to be honest. :)

Derailed from writing yesterday by All Romance Ebooks news

Lynn

All Romance Ebooks (aka Omnilit) is closing and I received the notice yesterday. So instead of writing I spent the day inactivating my books, removing links to them from my author websites, adjusting my sales spreadsheet, and reading reactions to the news.

This led me to doing my receipts and bills which is something I usually do on Tuesdays after my bank posts weekend transactions but didn’t do this Tuesday because I was sick. Then I caught up the accounting for my writing business because I’m going to be out about $780 because of ARe’s closure.

They’re offering to settle to avoid bankruptcy and legal action but I’m undecided.

Accept $0.10 on the dollar?

That’s $78 in lieu of the $780 that I’m owed. Knowing I can sue is worth $78 to me and $0.10 on the dollar is ridiculous.

But my cost benefit analysis tells me I should take the settlement because I won’t recoup the money owed and the stress of suing would not be good for me and my writing.

If I had the money, I’d sue for the principle of the thing, but 2016 has not been my best year. I didn’t publish enough and what I did publish wasn’t the stuff I can count on to make good money.

Priorities, huh?

Maybe I’ll get them right in 2017.

Feeling well enough to write

Lynn

I’m still in bed, writing this on my Kindle Fire, but when I get up I’m going to need to get writing today. My headache is improved although my eyeballs still hurt when I move them and my head is a bit sore feeling, especially around my temples and neck area. But the fever stayed gone last night so that makes about 24 hours without a fever.

I’ve lost several days of writing time, but I don’t honestly know how much I would have written anyway so I’m just going to put that behind me and aim to do as well as I can today.

Unintended holiday break

Lynn

Sick! I have no idea what kind of illness I’ve caught but I’ve been down with a sick headache and fever for two days.

I’m hoping for a reprieve tomorrow. For the first time in two days I’m starting to feel like the headache might be easing up. It’s been a doozy.

Another false start

Lynn

Today I didn’t write, nor did I finish my Christmas shopping. :o I’m not sure when I became one of those people, but yep, I’m there. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and I’ll have to finish my gift shopping in the morning.

This is not the person I want to be and that’s something I need to really spend some time thinking about because I’m there.

I am there.

Also, as embarrassing as it is to admit, I didn’t write yesterday either, except for the blog post in which I talked about how I was going to write 2,000 words.

Same goals, different day—a do-over for yesterday

Lynn

Yesterday I didn’t do any of the things I had planned, so I’m giving myself a do-over. Getting started is hard, and when I get started, I don’t plan to stop, so I’m just going to consider yesterday a false start.

Today I will write more than 2,000 words.

Today I will format a paperback and ready it for uploading.

Today I will finish my online Christmas shopping. ;)

Today I will stop making excuses for not writing as much as I say I want to write.

Today I will stop second guessing my writing process and stop wishing I was a faster writer.

Never mind when I say I didn’t do any of the things I had planned, because I did do that last one. I deleted the extra stuff on my spreadsheet that tracked my wph. Not the historical data, just the bits that tracked current day’s sessions: these things.

The first four items were really important though and I failed to do any of them. :o

So, first things first, online Christmas shopping must get done.

Then I will write some.

Then I will format that paperback.

Then I will write some more.

Then I will shop for Christmas party needs and other Christmas gifts.

Then I have no idea what I’ll do because I have no idea if I’ll reach my 2,000 words this morning, this afternoon, or if I’ll still be desperate for writing time. :D

Aiming for more but giving up the need for speed

Lynn

I’m finding it difficult to write now that my kids are home for the holidays. :o I should have guessed that’d be a problem, and yet… I made no plans and thought I’d just be able to write on through. That’s typical of my thought processes, unfortunately.

However, today, finally, I’ve got some time to myself and I aim to make the most of it.

Today I will write more than 2,000 words.

Today I will format a paperback and ready it for uploading.

Today I will finish my online Christmas shopping. ;)

Today I will stop making excuses for not writing as much as I say I want to write.

Today I will stop second guessing my writing process and stop wishing I was a faster writer. My average pace will either speed up over time or it won’t. Four years of trying haven’t brought any real improvement in that—and in fact, some days I worry that all my focus on trying to speed up has actually slowed me down.

The speed of my writing isn’t what’s holding me back. Time spent writing is the real problem. But don’t worry, I’m not about to say a schedule is the answer. It’s not. I’ve been down that path and found nothing much there for me. I don’t believe time quotas are right for me either. (Same post.)

Mostly I’m just going to try to write as much as I can and stop even using the timers for a while. Sure I’ll end up struggling sometimes, but that’s what quotas are for. They tell you when you’re done. If my rolling 30 day average is close to 2,000 words, I can call it quits anytime I want. If it isn’t, then I need to write a little harder. :D

Did resistance win today?

Lynn

I can’t decide. I planned to write this morning before I had to be somewhere (with someone, so no rescheduling). I couldn’t concentrate (something that seems to always happen when I have a trip or event planned for later in the day) so I decided to go early, thinking I’d just be back sooner. I planned for 3.5 hours away. It took 7 hours.

I could have done at least some writing when I got home but I was tired and I figured I’d just do a few 12 minutes sessions before bed. But now that I’ve turned on the computer, I don’t want to. I’m tired. Like, sit here for 3 minutes with my eyes closed before I typed this sentence tired.

I’m going to bed. I’ll have to answer the question about resistance later.

 

Not going to let resistance win today (It didn’t! Yay!)

Lynn

I’m going to sit down five times today and write at least 600 words. That’s the plan.

This little table of word counts that I put into my spreadsheet fits just perfectly on the main page so I don’t have to flip between worksheets. I’m hoping it will keep me on track.

The 12 is minutes. I do find it easier to keep my pace high in shorter sessions, so that’s the reason for that.

12 is .2 hours so all my decimal equivalents for the day’s writing will be nice and even.

20 x .2 = 4 hours

Now, time to write. I’m going to update this post regularly with my session counts today, to keep my mind focused on my plan.

Update #1

273 words in 4 sessions. The screenshot from my spreadsheet shows how poorly I did during each session. Only the last one shows promise.

I spent most of my 4 sessions working my way through already written material so maybe I can make up for some of this deficit in the next group of sessions.

Update #2

495 words in 4 sessions. Still under-performing.

Update #3

475 in 4 sessions.

Resistance hasn’t won, but something is sure holding me back. I’ve not reached 600 a group yet.

Update #4

558 words in 4 sessions.

There’ll be no more updates tonight because I had a few interruptions and came up short on time.

I finished the fourth block in two batches of two sessions each (notice that 49 when I came back? Obviously lost some momentum there…) and won’t finish the last block at all. It’s already past my bedtime by an hour or more. :)

However, I do feel like this little plan worked great and I’m going to try to keep it going, starting with tomorrow. Tomorrow might just have 4 blocks, but we shall see if I can fit one more in there. :D

Writing plan for Dec. 16, 2016

Lynn

Today I’m planning to do 10 sessions of 24 minutes each. (There’s a reason.)

It’s 11:19 AM and the day is dreary but writing is going to make it more fun. On the other hand, because I’m freezing, I’ve decided my character should be freezing too, and I’ve put him in a situation that makes that possible. ;) Poor baby. I’ve made him miserable, but hey, misery loves company as they say.

Anyway, I have to get busy if I want to do 10 full sessions today and I DO.

Also, no caffeine this morning and no headache so we’ll see how long that lasts!

Somewhere in the realm of 6 hours later…

I’ve had no caffeine today. I’ve also done no writing today.

Not sure what’s going on, except that my fingers are cold and stiff even though the outside temperature is about the same as yesterday (frigid), and that’s kept me hesitating every time I think of writing because I hate feeling cold and I find it impossible to write when my fingers are cold.

I’ve turned the heat up to 72. We’ll see if that helps. I won’t hit 10 sessions today, but I’m not going to bed until I get over the 1,000 word mark.

No early bedtime for me tonight!

And it was like a scrubbed launch. Crap.

Why 24 minute sessions?

Lynn

I’m writing in 24 minute sessions today (and yesterday) and I thought I’d explain why.

24 minutes = .4 hours.

That’s why. :D .4 hours is very close to my favorite session length of 20 minutes but has a nice and even decimal equivalent in hours, much like 30 minutes at .5 hours.

Really, that’s it. That’s the reason for 24 minutes instead of 20 minutes or 25 minutes.

As for why it’s not just an even 30 minutes… Well. 30 minutes feels so much longer than 24.

It does! I’m not kidding. 30 minutes throws up all kinds of mental blocks for me that 24 minutes doesn’t. So there you go. Who said humans were rational beings? We really aren’t. :)

An experiment for today

Lynn

I wrote a post or two yesterday but decided after posting to delete them because they just didn’t feel like they represented what I was really thinking and feeling even just a few hours later. That happens sometimes, so the best way to deal with it seemed to be DELETE. :D

I’m doing an experiment today, with breaking up my writing into chunks that I’ve scattered throughout my day. I’m really hoping to get 12 sessions of 24 minutes each done by the end of the day. I’ve already completed two.

Hours Words WPH
1 0.4 86 215
2 0.4 213 533

.4 hours = 24 minutes :)

I’ve scattered them out with breaks between pairs, but the breaks aren’t really meant to be breaks as much as opportunities to do other things—distractions, in other words, but useful distractions.

The hope is that by allowing the distractions, and planning for them, I will accomplish a lot more and not feel a bit of guilt about any of it! Let’s just call them structured distractions. :D

And I did put these on my calendar, but it’s not a schedule, it’s a plan. :D

Schedules feel so set, don’t they? As if you miss a start time, you’ve failed. Plans feel flexible. Sure, it’s a bit of a game, but all of life is in our heads, and I’m just playing to the referee.

I have several things to do today that ARE on my schedule, and those can’t change, so I’ve used it to see how many sessions I should do at various points in the day to stay on track. It’s working well so far.

I need to finish 4 before lunch, 4 before dinner, and 4 more before bedtime. If I finish all these today, I’ll end up with 4.8 hours of timed writing.

Anyway, off to write more, because I do want to finish the next two by lunch and stay on track. :)

3 0.4 276 690
4 0.4 299 748

And the numbers continue to improve. :D

Hours Words WPH
1 0.4 86 215
2 0.4 213 533
3 0.4 276 690
4 0.4 299 748
5 0.4 287 718
6 0.233333 207 887

My final numbers. Unfortunately, I had to take a nap. The caffeine withdrawal is getting to me. I had a cup of decaf coffee hoping that would be enough to stave off the headache, but it didn’t work. Just not enough caffeine. I finally ended up drinking about 3/4 a cup of green tea when I was supposed to be finishing session #8 but was in actuality only on session #6 because of the desperately needed nap. Said session was interrupted when I had to leave for a family event.

The event lasted longer than I thought it would and made me more tired than I expected. I came home and did some puttering around online and didn’t even finish session #6 (as you can see in the table above).

Well. Tomorrow is a new day. :) I can only aim to fit in 10 sessions because of more family obligations, but I’m going to try for a full 10 sessions! :D Wish me luck.

Quitting caffeine update

Lynn

I drank one cup of tea this morning at about 10 a.m. because of a headache, but that’s been the extent of today’s caffeine consumption.

The weaning is working out well. I’m feeling much better than I would have been feeling (lots of experience with this) if I’d just quit it altogether. :)

Now, if only I could get my writing off the ground today! My story is not cooperating with me. I spent I don’t know how much time on breaks during one 36 minute writing session—and the countdown timer still only made it down to 24 minutes! I did get some chores done, though, so there’s that. :D

WordPress 4.7 has a bug in the editor window

Lynn

The WordPress 4.7 update went well, but writing a post just became more difficult, because—bug. Possibly several bugs.

The window jitters and moves when trying to delete a space and just generally doesn’t react well to scrolling and other stuff at random times.

The table issue I complained about previously is still there. I can’t delete most tables in the visual editor. Instead, I have to go the text editor window to delete them.

But the jittery window is new, as is the fact that I was trying to delete an empty line while in the visual editor and it kept not deleting and the editor window and right side menu just kept jumping up and down. I had to go to the text editor to delete the blank line and the text editor said all that was there was a non-breaking space.

I’ve turned off the “Enable full-height editor and distraction-free functionality” and things feel a little more stable, but the fact is, the WordPress 4.7 editor has problems.

:D