Year-on-Year (YoY), September 2012

I'll keep this pretty short, as there isn't much to say.  My YoY from September showed pretty bleak numbers... basically this whole year.  I had a nice bit in August, when my IH series was bought in completion.

July was my first 0 sales month in the 17 months I'd been publishing at that point.  (January 2011 doesn't count, I started publishing in February.)

I'm hoping to ramp up with some good offerings this Christmas, pull myself up by my bootstraps as it were.  I'll have my second full novel coming out, tentatively in November ("Youth").  It will be in BOTH digital and print!  I'm considerably excited about that.

Also, the Writer's of the Future entry I submitted in July is up for judging between now and December!  Here's hoping I hear something good from that :)

Okay, so cut the suspense - here's the chart.

The Problem With Moving...

... is that everything you own HAS to go with you.

For people who are not sentimental hoarders, they may find this is no problem.  Old junk?  Throw it away!

For people who ARE sentimental hoarders, like myself, this is a Big, Big Problem.

First off, just because we have all this stuff, doesn't mean we want all this stuff.  It's quite overwhelming, actually.  Memories everywhere, and no fortitude to throw any of it away.  I think, actually, negative desire to get rid of it.

Fortunately, I'm not a shopper-hoarder.  I don't go out and buy a lot of stuff and then never take the tags off any of it, or leave it in the original shopping bag...  No, my stuff is accumulated through a lifetime of interaction with other people, who shove things onto my being, and which I am then incapable of disposing of.

So.

Moving all of that is just about the biggest pain in the rear you can picture.  Not just the packing, the mountain of boxes, of sheer stuff... but the pain inside that goes with parting with any of it.

I did good, real good, packing up my house.  In fact, I threw away twenty trash bags, and donated four boxes, including a giant box of stuffed animals and another of clothes.

I am not going to lie.  When the garbage men took away that first huge load (I did it in a few so they wouldn't get stuck with everything at once and so I could slowly make my way through the house), I had a moment of teary panic.  I had to tell myself, "You can't climb into the back of that dumpster truck, nor would you want to.  It's disgusting.  The stuff was trash.  If it wasn't, it is now.  Let it go."

Contrary to the mantra that, "It gets easier", it doesn't.  It really doesn't.  I think, if anything, you develop a stronger and more impulsive grip on things you still have.  It's like all your mania was spread over all these things, and with half of those things gone, you have twice as much mania for the remaining things.  But I managed to pack, and ship all my stuff away, and leave a lot of it in a landfill (sad face) back where I came from.

The thing about not being a shopper-hoarder, is that at least my stuff hasn't increased since then.  But it's still too much.  We moved from a three bedroom house with a full basement to a two bedroom apartment on the second floor.  We're swimming in boxes, and truthfully, I think most of it's mine.

I probably know, that most of it's mine.

So I made a pledge to myself that went something like this:
"I will throw away one thing, everyday, until I have an acceptable amount of things."

It may sound strange, but I am a minimalist at heart.  When I moved to Japan, I took two suitcases.  The airport stole one.  I survived just fine with one suitcase... for three years.

Now, of course I bought things while I was in Japan.  And a lot of those things ended up shipping back home with me (ugh).  But the point is, I felt free, happy, and unencumbered.  I loved that.  (I missed the half of my stuff that didn't make it... but... hey, whatareyagonnado.)

Today I should have throw away my 24th "thing".  I've "thrown away"... two.  One was a book that molded (BIG SAD FACE) and the other was a wallet that technically I gave to Andy because his fell apart, but I'm counting it anyway.

So today, I made the heart-string-pully decision to catch myself up and I started going through boxes.  A few of the things were easy, but when I could open a box and just go, "Nope, nothing in here" and close it... I'm in for a rough time.  So here's the things I threw away:

1. Kinex Big Ball Factory Instruction Manual
2. Kohl's Internship Lanyard with attached bracelets, nametag and pin.
3. Stuffed cow doll.  Present from high school friends.
4. Marching band saxaphone lanyard (to hold up sax while playing and marching).
5. Tiny stuffed dog with elongated velcro arms.
6. Gameboy Advance Pokemon Ruby instruction manual.
7. Waitress money collection/book thingy.
8. Starcraft Strategy Guide.
9. Brood Wars Strategy Guide.
10. Guard's Uniform shirt.
11. WoW Burning Crusade instruction manual.
12. City of Heroes quick start guide (they closed it down!!)
13 - 15. Gargoyle statues
16. Stuffed claw machine dog.
17 - 18. 2 Portal MTG decks.
19. The figurine from the top of my graduation cake.
20. Toy skeletal dragon.
21. Lipton bottle I was using as a pen holder
22. Old Starter ballcap with the Chinese symbol "star" from an ex when I was in high school and that will never fit my fat head again.

So with the moldy book and wallet, that makes twenty-four and I am all caught up :P

A 5k of a Different Color

I sure hope the title doesn't make you think I'm running, because hoo-boy, am I not doing that.

However, I set myself a personal goal today.  I wanted to write 5,000 words.  I wanted to make some sort of significant dent in my 500,000 word goal that I will probably not reach, but hey if they stars weren't so far away, we'd never stretch to grasp them.

It took me six sessions, and a marathon hour at the end, which I finished at 11:53 pm...

But I did it!

My final word count for the day was 5,456 words.  I worked on two stories, Tick and Youth.  I love Youth, but sometimes you need to do something different for awhile.  So about 1,200 words are for Tick and all the rest are for Youth.

Good writing day for me!

Youth sessions:

Tick sessions:

7.5k

Wow, I haven't been here in just over two months.  I am terrible at keeping up, haha!

Well, some good news for any Medrick fans out there.  I've finally kicked my own derriere hard enough and got myself moving.  I didn't do any writing yesterday, but I wrote the 23rd, 24th, 25th and 27th and I wrote 7.5k new words for my next brainchild in the pipeline, Youth.

7,531 to be exact.

This is a novel, not a short story, and I'd say it's about half done word-count wise.  As in, I'm expecting it to clock in around 50k, and if you look at my handy little word count meter down there, you'll see it shows 48.88% completion.  So yaysies for that :)

I have to throw a good thanks out to Michael Kingswood.  Awhile back he posted on his blog about this handy little chart he made for himself that helped him track the actual costs of his book.  (I'd post the link if I had it handy, but I don't remember even what month he posted it in.)  Basically you put in your start time for writing, and your end time, and how many words you wrote in that time, and (at $50/hr, which I think is reasonable for a writer) it tells you how many copies of your book you have to sell at your desired price (that you set, it figures your royalty).

Wow, looking over that sentence it sounds confusing!  But it is really, really, cool.  And on top of that, it's deeply motivational to someone who thinks like me.  I'm pretty creative, but I also have a hard science side.  I like to see things happen, know results.  When I write, yeah, my word count goes up, and I know some hours here and there, but how much time am I actually spending?

What is the cost of my time?

As writers take the dropped ball from agents and publishers and have to look more at the business side of their craft, things like this become really important.

Say it took me a year to write a book.  (I know, I know.  A year?  What the hell am I doing?!?  Haha.)  As a business person, I'd have to ask myself: why?  When I take typing tests, I always clear 90+ wpm.

Say my novel is 50,000 words long.  Now say I type a flat 90wpm.  With that math, it takes me a little over 555 minutes to complete a novel.  Or, in another sense - less then 9 1/2 hours.

Now, why did a 9 1/2 hour project take me ONE YEAR to complete?

Okay, okay, I'll give a little slack.  I don't thunder-type for an hour straight at 90wpm when I'm writing a manuscript.  Sometimes I have to stop, and think.  Are my characters behaving realistically?  Do I have enough setting?  Can you see this scene, or is it vague?  Those questions take time to answer.  Also, sometimes I misspell words and backspace doesn't count toward your keystrokes, ha ha ha.

Here's another fun fact: The longer I sit at my computer, the less work I'm going to get done.

It sounds like baloney, but I think a lot of people will agree to being the same way.  If I were at a cubicle job, doing the same general tasks over and over, that's different - I constantly have something to do, with little variation.

But when I'm writing, worlds are flowering under my fingertips, through the imperfect filter of my own brain and vocabulary.

There's going to be hitches.

So I find, in the end, I write fantastically in small spurts.  Then - I walk away.  Yes, WALK AWAY!  I go play video games for an hour, or frisbee with the dog, or watch an episode of some random television show. I do something that clears the filter, and then I come back later.  Sometimes an hour, sometimes a day later.

Okay, so 7.5k of a 50k novel is 15%.  If it were a 9 1/2 hour project, I should have completed it in a mere 85 minutes!

Truth time?  It took me 4.06 hours.  (Another fun metric this spreadsheet tracks!)  BUT, those were a very productive 4 hours.  They weren't all at once, they were over 4 days.  Huh, that sounds suspiciously like the, "Write at least an hour a day" mantra I hear going around :P

Aaaaand, I don't manage to write 90wpm while writing.  My best day of those four, I wrote at a speed of (thank you, spreadsheet!) 2324.52 words/hr, or (haha) 38.7wpm.  I blame the thinking time variable!  (At that pace it would take me 21.5 hours to complete the first draft manuscript... still considerably more reasonable than the YEAR it supposedly took.)

But I guess the most important things to take away from this post are:
1. Write at a comfortable pace.
2. "Thinking" time can eat into your hours.
3. A novel shouldn't take a year to write.
4. If you wrote 1,000 words a day, every day for a year, you'd write 365,000 words, or more than 7, 50k novels.
5. Know your business!  Writing has a cost all its own!

And for anyone with a geeky maths and science side like me, have a gander!

And, now that you can all see it, I can't hide.  This is the truth about writing, for me.  I often don't spend more than a half hour at a time sitting still, and yes, each one of those sessions represents a complete chapter.

NERVES

Hallo there all.  I just wanted to take a moment to talk about submissions.  Of the writing kind.

Today I submitted a story to Writer's of the Future.  Now, when I was deciding I wanted to put my writing out in the great big world, the query-go-round was the first huge obstacle.  It didn't take me very long to decide that wasn't the type of career I wanted to have.  I wanted something that would seriously reward me as an author, not just my pride in being "in print".

Then along came these fancy e-reader things, and I knew I wanted one the day they were announced.  I lived in Japan and I begged and begged and begged my parents, "If you get me anything for Christmas - just get me this, and I will be THRILLED."  And, that's all I got that Christmas, and I was THRILLED.  (See how that works?)  The best part was that I could get English-language books to read while in Japan.  I have to say, there is a shortage of English texts in the land of the rising sun ;)

But somehow it didn't occur to me that I could get MY works on that fancy digital book.  And then, one day, like magic, it did.  I was busy working on another story that sits forlornly in the "Whoops, I abandoned you!" pile and I came across KDP.  Incidentally, I came across it on the internet because sometimes while writing, I go on brief research spurts to make sure I'm not talking out of my hat, and that I actually know what I am saying is true.

So anyway, then I started doing lots of investigating into KDP.  But the problem was - I hadn't written a novel.  I had come close a couple of times, lengthy, sometimes rambling manuscripts, but never anything concrete.

I moved home.  Stuff happened, and then I wrote a novel.  A complete one, my first one, "Shackled".  And let me tell you, by the end of it, I was thinking, "Why would anyone ever want to write one of these?"  Because I was brutal on myself and I forced my arse into the computer chair to write and write and write the freaking story until I was done.  It took me about three months total and looking back more effort was spent getting over myself than actually writing.  That's not to say it's not good - I think it's an awesome story - but I was quite melodramatic about it, to myself.

I got it all ready, and I put it up on Kindle and crossed my fingers and toes and eyes and... well, not much happened.  I sold a few copies and I got a couple 5 star reviews.  Luckily, that's more than some (so I've heard.)

Well now I've turned this into kind of a rambly backstory, sorry.  But the short of it is, I don't have a lot of experience with submissions.  I haven't received a hobojillion rejections like Konrath or others.  I actually haven't even received one.

Mostly because I haven't submitted anything :P

But I mean to be serious about this writing thing.  Remember the whole 52 Shades of Short Stories I want to participate in?  Well, I seem to do short stories well, and if I'm not writing novels, then they need to be submitted somewhere.  Today started my submissions journey - a 1,250 word short entitled "Moebied" and cast to the great dark waters of Writer's of the Future.  May they treat it gently.

And again, sorry for the rambly but... NERVES.

On the Twelfth Day...

So last time I posted, it was about finishing the short story, "Need".  Twelve days later, and I just wrote another short story, "Moebied."  It's 1,247 words long... about a thirdish the length of "Need".  I also have another unpublished short I wrote awhile back called "Singularity."  Now I'm puzzled as to which to submit for Writer's of the Future!  Obviously I'd like to submit my best work.  I'd like to get two or three beta readers for "Moebied", if anyone's interested?

Well, I'm happy to be writing again.  :)  Twelve days is a much shorter break than er... three months.

I was really interested in joining 52 Shades of Short Stories.  I still am, actually, even though I'm coming in mid-year (but it was really only started mid-year hehe).  I wrote "Need" on 7-8, a Sunday, which I could say started that week.  Now I wrote "Moebied" today (Friday), which is technically the next week.  That makes me two for two weeks ;)

Hmm, it might be pushing it next week to be three for three hehe, but we'll see!  Anyway, yay writing :)

3 Months~

Wow, I haven't posted in three months and I have no good excuse.  Truthfully, I haven't written pretty much since I stopped posting.  How's that half a million word challenge going, you ask?  Well, don't :P

The good news is that I broke the long drought and in a marathon writing session (I'm talking 6+ hours, with goofing around splattered in the middle) I wrote a complete short story called "Need".

The story begs the question, "What is the last thing a man will ever need and how far will he go to get it?"

At 4,136 words I wrote this a lot slower than usual.  Not merely the goofing around, I was incredibly picky about my phrasing.  How picky?

Final check of the documents shows ZERO PERCENT passive voice usage.

I know.  -I- didn't even realize it was so low, until I looked at the checker.  I know there were a few sentences I changed around to remove the was/were/to be.  I know the characters probably used some passive voice, but to register at zero percent?  I think that's pretty rocksome!

Also, I got to use the word "slattern".

Intrigued by this story?  I'm considering submitting it to Writer's of the Future... and if I do, it will be my first... EVER... actual submission.  I just haven't been interested in that part of publishing.  But I'm getting there.  In fact, with the way I write short stories, I'm becoming VERY interested in the short fiction market, in general.  I've been browsing submission guidelines.

So, that's what's new with me :)