Writing Accountability Post #13

This was the view this morning. About three inches here. It melted away during most of the day, but now it's snowing again. However, we're supposed to have temps in the 60s next Sunday. Will that happen? We shall see....

Another week where I'm wrestling with the very concept of doing this accountability work. Today was a big day and a first--the first quarterly assessment since I've started this tracking system. That meant I looked at my planned production schedule and--flinched. Yes, I'm running behind. Not just for the month but for the year. A big chunk of that, however, was figuring out promotion this month and trying to find a balance between promotion, authentic interactions on social media, and writing time. And horse time, and house time, and sewing time as well!

But I got things done this past month. The updated versions of the Martiniere books are now all up, and all I need to do is tweak the back matter once in a while. At this point, I'm focusing on getting the Netwalk books up--and I absolutely cringed when I looked at my Bowker ISBN listings. Netwalk has something like seven different ISBN versions, all for ebooks, none for paperback. SIGH. Yes, this reflects what was considered to be the thing to do during the early days of self-publishing. You got an ISBN for Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble/Kobo because they all had different variants of epub. I eventually dropped getting ISBN for the proprietary Amazon ebooks, then moved to just using distributor ISBNs. Still, I wish I could have had those numbers for the upcoming paperbacks. Oh well. Another batch purchased from Bowker in my future. I've learned my lesson.

Daylight Saving Time also really screwed me up as far as productivity is concerned. However, one thing that is working is using my alarm to get up at eight. Yeah, yeah, that's the easy life of a retiree, except that if I don't watch it, I end up sleeping in more and more, and I don't get as much done.

I am also backing off from trying to market short stories except as a part of a collection. I looked at the rejects I have right now, and decided it was time to hold them for a collection. I realized that I might be able to put together a Weird West collection with my Oregon Country short stories. Two are published; one isn't, and since all three are on the longish side, they can possibly make a nice little grouping. I need to go back through and look at some of my other work as well. If one story comes back, then it would be a good part of a fabulist collection. I could pull out the longer version of that story and combine it with two, perhaps three others for another collection.

The rest? I may need to look at what's SF and what's not, and group them appropriately. I might actually have enough for two separate collections, so...four short story collections, potentially?

Wow. Plus the Tales of the Raven Alliance. One story is out on submission and I may just pull it when it comes back, and use that one for the foundation for a Kindle Vella set of stories before I publish it as a collection.

(And now I need to set up a spreadsheet collecting those stories...eiyiyi).

The Cost of Power is now at around 60k words, and might turn into another Martiniere short series. Or not. I wrote about half of those words in the past two weeks, in part because I had visualized the story to that point. Now I need to turn that energy to Federation Cowboy. I want to get both of those books finished so I can move onto the Goddess's Vision series--oh, and once I finish rereleasing the Netwalk books in paperback, the Goddess's Honor series--incorporating the connected short stories in some cases--will be the next to be reissued.

Plus I made two book bags, one for donation, the other for my projected online store where I'll be selling my small quilting projects along with my books. That's a long term goal. I also made spring decorations and summer decorations--just need to do fall, and then I'll start making SFFnal versions for...online sales.

Busy times ahead.