I just purged over half of my published stories off of this platform. Hello, I think I’m back.
Oh boy, it’s already May of 2021 and I just realized that I’ve barely touched this platform since the end of 2019.
I wrote 2 stories during 2020 and that was it. I’ve barely been on to even read other’s stories, and that had been a mild (massive) obsession that had overtaken my social media addiction by a landslide after I discovered Medium.
Despite not being active on the platform, my past stories have proven adequate enough to pay about double my membership, so it’s still been in the green while I’ve been scrolling aimlessly on tik tok like an…
You don’t plan on submitting that draft next month, do you?
It’s that time of year again! Pumpkin spice lattes are out, and gingerbread lattes are in.
My stupid ‘Writer at Work’ stickers in my Redbubble shop that I made 7 years ago are selling like hotcakes.
Cafes are full of people pecking away on their computers and as I look out among them I can only wonder how many are working on their NaNoWriMo manuscripts, and I hope a lot of them are.
My social feeds are full of people encouraging one another to push harder and more sharing their word counts and story plots and ‘should my character do…
There’s still 28 days left to go and marketing from here is going to be tough.
You read that right. I just launched my first Kickstarter with a goal of $1000, and it not only hit that goal in 2 hours, it then doubled before 24 hours was up.
Let me set the scene for you, walk with me. Pretend you’re me, a struggling artist and writer, living paycheck to paycheck, grinding it out in casual and part-time jobs while trying to land that one full-time dream job. …
My mind is blown. I didn’t intend for it to happen, but it did and it’s still growing.
There are a lot of stories about mailing lists and how to grow them and how valuable they are. I’ve read most of them and they’re still bookmarked, but I actually gave up because I kept getting nowhere fast.
I have 2 mailing lists. One for my writing and one for my 3D art.
Now, I’ve followed all of the mailing list rules. I have a free download for my subscribers, I don’t spam them with anything other than wholesome, useful content, I put a signup form for my writing list at the end of every article I write and…
I feel like crawling into bed and doing nothing … instead I’m working harder.
Yesterday was a good day. I finished sculpting the next 3d model in my Kickstarter that is launching next month and then I chilled out and tried to play some video games as a reward. That part was hard, I was so blasted after a day of computer work that I could hardly form sentences to talk to my friend when he came over. I also sorted out a mess with my accountants, got a refund from them and then planned some future products of my Etsy shop.
Productive.
I went to bed planning for today to be a day…
I did a lot of things wrong.
So around this time last year, I was launching my company. Now, it wasn’t strictly my company, I started it with a partner who put forward the capital while I put forward the design work and ideas. (I got ripped for going on social media and saying “Hey, my company is having a sale,” yeah, you probably see where this story is going already.)
We got down to business and started a vegan beauty company. I’m not a vegan, but my partner was and I support that market and am against testing on animals wholeheartedly.
Well, two years later, that…
November is coming to a close … please don’t start querying that 50k pile of drivel.
Another year, another batch of NaNoWriMo participants.
Just to start, this is in no way a dig into the yearly word-splurgers. I used to participate in NaNo too. NaNo was how my manuscript, Bloody Frost, began. Mind you, that was four years ago and I’ve only just completed it and started sending out queries to agents.
Yes, I put four years between my NaNo entry and my query status for that manuscript.
If you compared my manuscript now to the one I wrote back then, you’d never know they were the same story. …
Making money with a side hustle hard, but it can be done. Designers, pay attention.
Get ready to work your ass off, because it’s the only way to grab ahold of those proverbial bootstraps and drag yourself out of student debt, or whatever hole you might be in, or just add a new income stream to help with the bills.
Work work work.
If you’re reading this then you’re obviously interested in selling online, but how do you do that without spending money upfront?
Etsy is a shop for handmade items, but making that stuff costs money and guess what? I don’t have any of that stuff.
But I do have an Etsy shop, with…
I spent years talking about it, and then I decided to put my book where my mouth was.
Many of us want to be authors, few of us make it. This isn’t a story of my resounding success and how I got there, because I’m not there. I’m still one of the little minnows dreaming of becoming a goldfish. Well, not so much swimming as flailing around with a manuscript and an abundance of terrible query letters.
I’ve been working on my book series for years. I’ve got a whole thing planned. Multiple books, multiple characters, intertwining plots slivering through bigger plots that are linked to smaller plots that have even more twists and turns to snake through…
After 4 years of long nights, too much coffee, sacrificial offerings, a stagnant social life and a heap of heartache, it’s finally done. What am I doing now?
When I wrote those two little words at the end of a 95k word manuscript, my day ended.
What now?
I sat here at my computer not knowing what to do with myself. Multiple drafts. Years of my life. Hours of my day, every day. Sleepless nights. All gone with the appearance of two little words.
The End.
After an odd bout of bereftness, I started work on the next leg of the journey.
Queries.
Whoever invented query letters and cover letters and synopsises and blurbs personally runs a level of hell that I’m currently trapped in, and they’re watching…
