Regular posting and this theme

I’m planning to start posting regularly again, but in the meantime, I’m looking for a new theme for the site. I’m not really happy with the current one. I like it a lot as far as aesthetics, but I don’t think it works for easy access to the site’s content. I like columns. Sidebars. On my phone, it works, but most of the time, I’m looking at the site on my computer, and for that, it just wastes a lot of space.

Ignored another Amazon KDP survey

Once I realized how unresponsive Amazon is to the surveys they send out, it was easy to start ignoring their survey emails. It’s also easy to see how much it isn’t about being helpful to authors and publishers on their platform and is about collecting information about their competition. And gaining leverage over the authors who use their platform to publish their books.

This latest survey purported to be a survey to improve their print publishing, but the first batch of questions were clearly focused on gathering as much information about the competition as possible.

Many people will give away their valuable business data and think nothing of it. I decided a while back it was better to send feedback in an email and ignore these surveys completely.

Naughty naughty Amazon. :D

Attempt to write 60,000 words in July

I’m off to a slow start this month on a big goal. My current best word count for a month is 57,249. I want to write 60,000 words this month to beat that.

Every so often, it’s a good idea for me to try to beat one of my previous records. This feels like a good time to try.

Plans for the year—2022

I’m just pasting this from my year in review post so I don’t forget I’ve already planned this out. :D

Here’s the plan.

1) Start a 1,000 words a day streak. That would get me about 183,000 words before the end of the year.

2) Focus on finishing each book quickly instead of jumping between projects.

3) Work on more than one project at a time. This doesn’t contradict number two, because it is based on working on the same multiple projects each day. I have two pen names. I also have three types of stories under one pen name (novels, short stories, and my experiment with a serial). I also have different series. I will settle on a way to choose which projects get worked on and then I’ll work on them until they’re done.

June 2022 progress

This is my first monthly progress post in a while. I thought I was about to get back to productive writing in November, and I did for a while, but then some life events happened that threw me back into the place where my ability to write creatively disappeared again.

I lost both my father and an aunt I was very close to in June. My father passed after multiple strokes, the first of which we thought he had come back from remarkably strong. It was a false win. Less than a month later, he was hit by an even bigger, more devastating stroke, and in the end, I had to let him go even though I wasn’t ready. Dad died without life insurance, a will, or any beneficiaries listed for any of his accounts. This has created a lot of financial issues that will have to be resolved, but I’ve done what I can on that at this point.

Things are settling now and I am ready to try again to get back to my plans for 2022.

Emotionally, I still feel out of sorts and not quite able to draw on whatever part of my brain it is that drives my creativity, but I don’t think it’s ever productive after a certain point to sit around and wait for it to get better.

I have big goals for July. Even if I fail, I will succeed as long as I try, because that will mean I’m getting better.

I am surprised that I got any words in June at all but I did putter several times and end up keeping alive a streak of no zero or negative word months for 2022.

Today, I’ll try to start a 1,000 words a day streak for the rest of July. I have a better than average chance since this is a Camp NANO month and I’ve set a goal that will break my record for words in a month. The record is 57,249 from April 2016.

June words: 335

Year in review—2021

Oh, boy. 2021 was not a great year for me in a lot of ways. I feel like I escaped it by the skin of my teeth, and in some ways, I feel like I’m still stuck there, trying to get out.

I wrote that first paragraph before things went bad in 2022, but I do think I finally escaped 2021 at the end of the year. I started off 2022 in a way that feels good. It didn’t last, but at least the issues of 2021 didn’t linger past their expiration date.

If there’s anything I learned from the mess I made of the year, it’s to not wait when I’m stuck in a book.

Looking back, I can see in February 2020 I was having an issue with a book that didn’t get resolved until I sat down in 2021 at the end of the year and made myself just claw my way through the material until I had something that worked. A lot of the stuff I was unhappy with ended up in the end product. It wasn’t bad. I was the problem. And the hardest truth is the one that says if I had just tossed all those words back in 2020 (multiple times if necessary) and started over from any point that felt like a good place to restart, I could have finished several more books instead of staying stuck.

2021 was my worst year for production of words since I started keeping track in 2012. It edged out 2020 by 1,515 words.

Two bad years in a row could be a death knell for my career unless I can improve dramatically in 2022.

The first half of 2022 has been just as bad, but I do still think I can recover.

Here’s the plan.

1) Start a 1,000 words a day streak. That would get me about 183,000 words before the end of the year.

2) Focus on finishing each book quickly instead of jumping between projects.

3) Work on more than one project at a time. This doesn’t contradict number two, because it is based on working on the same multiple projects each day. I have two pen names. I also have three types of stories under one pen name (novels, short stories, and my experiment with a serial). I also have different series. I will settle on a way to choose which projects get worked on and then I’ll work on them until they’re done.

I’m not going to post my month by month word counts for 2021. Too much trouble, and no one cares to be honest.

I published a novella, started a serial, and published a short story in 2021.

2021 words: 34,134

My Kindle Vella story has the lowest profit for any story I’ve published

Yeah, I just did the math for the earnings per word for my Kindle Vella story and although I knew it was bad, I hadn’t realized just how bad.

As of this moment, my Vella story has earned me $0.01833520 per word. Not per month, but for all time. I’ll bring this up again in a few months and see if things still look as pitiful.

Admittedly, I’m doing no advertising or other promotion of the story, because I have other priorities, and I always intended this just to be a way to get me writing regularly again, but the sad fact is, I have a lot of projects that I want to do, that will also earn me significantly more (I can’t even stress how much more) money than this project has been earning me.

I wanted to finish this in a reasonable time frame, but I just don’t think it makes sense in any world to do more than the bare minimum for this until I’m ready to actually sit down and finish it wholesale because I’m ready to publish it as a book.

Which, thank goodness I fully plan to sell this as a book later. Otherwise, I would feel like it was a lost cause and put it so far onto the back burner that I might never get around to picking it up again. I have a series I’ve let that happen to. I’m not happy about it, because I like writing the books, but I don’t like writing the books more than I like writing the other books in my other series and they make me a lot more money, so I’ve kept putting off that next book. It’s been about five years at this point.

I really need to spend more time writing.

And that’s another thing. This year, I’ve decided (as of this moment, to be honest) to stop saying I need to write faster. Because yes, on some level I do need to write faster and I wish I was better at that, but the true, underlying, number one reason I don’t write “faster” is because I don’t spend enough time writing.

So it’s time to own up to that and start talking about it in a way that is honest with myself.

Yes, there are days where I spend plenty of time writing and maybe I don’t write as much on some of those days as I wished because I’m not a 1,000 words per hour writer. But. And it’s a big but. Those days don’t happen as often as the days where I just do not spend enough time writing and end up with a word count commensurate with that effort.

Ah. Honesty is hard to swallow sometimes. And this post is a bit of an accountability post for me.

All that said, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my 2022 goals even as late as it is into the new year (quarter one is done, for goodness’ sake). I’ll be back with a post about it when I’m ready.

False starts and reconfigurations

I’m recovering from a few false starts this year, the first of which began in November of last year. I’m trying to settle into writing again, regularly, after a long stretch of not writing much at all.

I still don’t know with absolute certainty what caused that, although I have several theories. I worry that it’ll happen again, but since I can’t be sure of the cause, there’s not a lot of point to that worry. It happened, and now it’s time to move on. That’s the way of life more often than not anyway.

Despite the false starts, I’ve continued to improve. But we all know the saying, two steps forward and one step back, so I’m not surprised by the path I’m on.

I’ve made a few changes. I decided to ditch writing every day in favor of writing every weekday.

I don’t like schedules, but I realized I really need some regular downtime.

If I was facing burnout, and that’s just as possible as my other theories, I need to guard against future burnout. Since most people I know and interact with have weekends off, I chose to have weekends off, too. I need to visit family more often, spend more time with friends, and that’s a good time to do it.

So far, I have loved it. To a degree far greater than I expected. So I’ll be keeping that going forward.

But yes, I have had a little more trouble getting back into routine writing, but I’m working on it.

This is my accountability post to say that although I’m working on it, I’m still a ways off from true success and I need to keep working on it.

My intention is to be a prolific writer. Prolific writers keep writing. :)

Sprinting in Discord

If you’re in many writing themed servers on Discord, you’ll probably know all about sprinting and sprint channels. What it is is something like a chat with features specifically for people sprinting to get words.

Most use a bot that you set as a timer with something like _sprint for 20 in 3 which translates to start a twenty minute sprint in three minutes, for me and whoever joins me. Then you join the sprint with a beginning word count, and when it’s over, you update your word count and it tracks the numbers for you, doing all that pesky math if you want it to.

I don’t need it for that, because I use my own spreadsheet. But I like the community of it when I’m having a hard time focusing.

Today, I realized that although I like the community of it, I never seem to get in flow doing them in the same way I can when I run my own timer, and I rarely end up with any appreciable word counts after even long sessions of them.

Basically, time spent in the sprinting channel does not translate into a commensurate number of new words.

This is probably a case of me liking them the way I like chocolates and candies. They’re delicious, but they aren’t doing me any favors.

So, this is my post to myself to say I’m not going to do them anymore.

I can hang out in Discord when I want to chat about writing with other writers, but using it for sprints is not a fit for my personal work style. It’s time I admit that and take the necessary steps to make sure I’m writing to my fullest potential when I’m focused enough to do it.

Sometimes, it’s hard for me to remember the things I’ve set my mind to do and not to do, but writing things down sometimes helps. I won’t say always, as the dining room chair I am now doing my writing in again reminds me. My post about that is coming sooneventually. ;D

Making changes

I changed my website’s WordPress theme. I like this new one for the most part.

My sidebar is missing, and I miss it, but the options for themes with a sidebar were limited by my requirements and what I wanted. So I’m learning to live with it.

All the links you could find in the sidebar are now at the bottom of the page.

And the good news is that my archive pages, category and tag pages, too, now show a summary or excerpt instead of the whole post. So you can skim a little easier to find what you want, if that’s something you want to do.

I also added a new link into the top menu called “I write” to make it just a little quicker to get to some of those pages that were linked in the sidebar.

Overall, I’m happy with the change, but we shall see if I like it long-term. Sometimes it can take me a few weeks to really decide how I feel after I make a change. :)

Ah, the critical voice

Critical voice is that part of yourself that wants you to be perfect. Since perfection doesn’t exist, that voice will win any argument it starts.

The trick is not to argue with it.

It’s that person at the party that you can’t have a discussion with because they aren’t really listening, they’re just thinking ahead to their next rebuttal. But, but, but…

You can’t argue with those people (why are you trying?) and you can’t argue with your critical voice.

It knows all your secrets and it knows all your weak spots.

It knows mine.

I’m going through my own battles with critical voice right now. I recognized today that something I thought wasn’t even related was, in fact, just a sign that my inner critic had gotten the best of me.

When the critical voice is winning, it’s hiding from you. It doesn’t want you to realize it’s there, because you might fight back.

But you can’t attack it directly, with words, with reason. It’s not reasonable. And it will win.

You have to put it in a closet, or in the ground. You have to bury it, and ignore it, and pretend you don’t see its ghost out of the corner of your eye. It will hide in the shadows and it will claw at your brain. The moment you look at it and say I know you’re there, it will go into hiding again, to wait, to lurk, to sulk.

Face it and it will hide. Ignore it and it will lose.

Give it a voice, and you’re the one who loses.

It can feel like an unending effort to ignore something buried so deep inside you that you can never cut it out.

It’s worth it. Writing is never more fun than it is when you’re completely, unabashedly ignoring your inner critic.

I see critical voice as one facet of perfectionism. Perfectionism will destroy your soul. It will kill every creative thought you have. So guard against it. Fight tooth and nail to keep it out of the light and out of your head.

Here are some of my favorite links about critical voice for further reading. Some address critical voice directly. Some talk about things that are a sign that your critical voice is making trouble, even if you don’t recognize it as such.

Boy am I glad I’m not exclusive to Amazon (one more reason to be happy wide)

Ah, I got fired up tonight and wrote a post for my personal site about Amazon and their shitty ways of mistreating people. If you’re bored, go read it. If you want to share in the hate, leave a comment. :-)

The incident left me deeply unsettled as an author who depends on KDP for a significant chunk of author earnings.

Although I’ve been wide with my books from the beginning and intended to stay that way, this made me even more so determined to stay away from exclusivity with anyone, but especially with Amazon. They just can’t be trusted. Whether it is incompetence, willful ignorance, or deliberate shady dealings by the employees in charge, there’s just no way to know. But I won’t risk it.

I finally started a Patreon and opened a Ko-fi account. I’ve been looking at some other alternative publishing paths, too. Specifically for a Kindle Vella story I started last year. I had put off branching out with it, even though they had to cave on their terms to allow authors to put their stories up with other paying markets, or risk no one being willing to give it a shot. I’m going to make sure I get that taken care of this month.

Amazon doesn’t deserve my exclusivity, anywhere, even for a little side project I only started to get me writing regularly again.

At the time the incident happened, I wasn’t in the mood to write about it. Then I was supposed to work on something tonight and my inner procrastinator came out. I started looking around for things to do, got reminded of how badly Amazon had pissed me off, and I wrote a post. :D And then a bit of another one here.

TL;DR, Amazon sucks can’t be trusted.

1,499 posts about nothing?

Well, I’m passing a milestone with this post. This is post number 1,500. :)

Most of the posts of Perpetualized.com are just my ramblings about my writing days. Considering it’s been about 7,000 days since I started this site, and about 3,550 since I started writing to self-publish (as opposed to writing to send to a publisher or hobby writing), that’s not so bad.

Most of the posts don’t really have any meaning for anyone but me. There are a few gems scattered around the site, though I admit they’re hard to find.

:)