Thurs. Feb. 1, 2024: How Information Affects The Plan
image courtesy of Gerd Altmann via pixabay.comThursday, February 1, 2024
Waning Moon
Cloudy and raw
You can read the latest on the garden, including tomorrow’s planting plans, over on Gratitude and Growth.
The car passed inspection! Phew! All I had to do was get the taillight replaced. They said I fixed the windshield wiper properly.
Today’s serial episode is from LEGERDEMAIN:
Episode 160: Another Attack on Shelley
Shelley is attacked again, and her rescuer is a surprise. Or is he?
I puttered in the morning, trying to get some work done, and headed out just before 10 to deal with the car inspection. They were very nice. They had to order a new bulb and have someone run it up there, but once it arrived, they popped it in, and the car passed inspection. Enormous Phew.
Now, I have to get the tire patched and switched back out, so I have a spare.
Once the inspection was done, I did a library run, and then, I was home. Exhausted. Ready to nap for about a week, but home.
The website renewal went through just fine. The car insurance payment went through just fine. So all good on that front.
Turned around some score sheets. Did a training session for the volunteer judging I’m doing, which was very helpful.
Booked the tire patch appointment for tomorrow morning.
Wrote and submitted the book review, and told them I am ready for the next assignment.
A friend of mine had very sad news, and I wish there was more I could do to help her.
Hit a wall by mid-afternoon, and was caught up on the have-tos (although not the want-tos). I read an anthology of essays called THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN, published by Tin House in 2019. Writers talked about how and why we/they write.
There were some very specific quotes that resonated with me deeply:
“Literature is intimate behavior between strangers” – Russell Baker, p. 40.
“Fiction results from imagination working on experience” – Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 101.
“Fiction is experience translated by, transformed by, transfigured by imagination” – Ursula Le Guin, p. 105.
“The work of the artist is to see into the life of things” – Jeannette Winterson, p. 185.
Separately, each of these gives one hours of meaning on which to ponder. Put them together, and the resonance is even stronger.
I am sure I will come back to these quotes often in the coming months.
Did not sleep particularly well, and woke up at 3. I hope we are not going back to THAT pattern. I’d hoped I finally broke it.
No meditation this morning, because the teacher is sick again. Which is not surprising, since she stopped taking precautions after the first time she caught COVID, and then wonders why she keeps getting it. Sigh.
On today’s agenda: Legerdemain, both writing new material and revising, editing, uploading, polishing, and scheduling episodes. I may only upload two today and two over the weekend. We’ll see. I have a few small coverages to turn around (mostly score sheets), and then maybe start the contest judging, since I had the training yesterday, and there’s MUCH more in my judging panels than I agreed to. I did not realize this was a nation-wide contest for high school age writers (although I am judging just entries from within the state).
Work stats from January:
New words: 70,652
Editing: 64,386
Client work: 26,257
Video/website hours: 9
So what does that tell me?
If I’d worked on a single project for January, I would have close to a complete new novel (or, if it was category-length, a complete novel). The average word count on new material per day was between 2500 and sometimes up to nearly 6K. This is good information, especially if I feel like I’m not getting somewhere on a project; it’s slower because my time must be spread out over multiple projects. And it’s a fairly realistic look at the output I need to do in a given month (although I suspect it’s closer to 60K than 70K).
As for editing, that’s a good chunk, and makes sense. I edited the serial material, and I edited a novella, a one-act play, and a poem. That feels like a solid amount of work and fits in with the overall what was accomplished.
Client work: That’s a pretty good amount of work done for the month. But it also indicates that I’m definitely being underpaid for what I do, when I look at the income. Again, this is important information. The current clients aren’t going to pay me more. Therefore, it’s time to add some new clients to the mix. I can set a multi-month strategy for that, now that I have this information. I have some ideas on how I will do that; it’s a case of carving out the time to work on the LOIs and proposals. Now that I see how vitally necessary it is, and that it will not behoove me to coast for much longer, I can get to work. I also need to get back to pitching articles. I didn’t do much of that last year, and I need to get back on that horse. I enjoy writing articles. When they are paid appropriately – not these $20 for a 2K article idiocies.
Video/website time was only 9 hours, and I did not spend as much time marketing as I should. I need to spend more time on the websites, updating and adding new material. In the case of the Cerridwen’s Cottage website, there’s a good deal of work to do there, as well as reshaping some material that originally appeared in almanacs a long time ago into new formats, and to build up the name recognition there. My editor told me that the almanacs sell 20,000 copies minimum. That’s an audience I need to tap, since I’ve been in these annuals since 1994. I had hoped to do some website work on LEGERDEMAIN this week, while it was the week dedicated to LEGERDEMAIN, but we all know how the week went cattywampus. While I will up my marketing in February (especially with a couple of ad buys and doing some of the Vella games), serious website work won’t happen until March.
I admit, I grumble sometimes when I’m filling out the day’s form, but this is important information on how I’m growing and changing my business this year. And by “business” I mean the fiction as much as the copywriting. I can’t count on royalties; those are going to fluctuate. While some royalties and bonuses from the serials carried me last year during the strike, the reconstruction of payouts doesn’t give the same bang for the wordcount. It’s something I talked about on the blog a few weeks ago, about how I need to balance the long game and the short game for the serials. Because of the restructuring, a good many of the short game and those who can’t be consistent with episodes and/or thought this was quick cash are getting out of the game, which leaves more room for those of us serious about it. But it’s getting the material in front of our audience, beyond the author groups reading each other’s episodes, that’s always the challenge. This is where the demise of Twitter has had a huge impact, although TikTok has somewhat made up for it.
Anyway, that’s a bit of a glimpse into the business side of the full-time writing, especially from a freelancer who doesn’t do the typical corporate gigs and doesn’t consider writing fiction and plays and the rest a hobby, but also doesn’t have one of the Big 4 publishers behind the work.
I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t finish the CAST IRON MURDER edits, but that is on the schedule for this month.
I better get going, hadn’t I? Have a good one! I keep thinking it’s Friday, but it’s only Thursday.
