Tues. Oct. 1, 2024: Start of a New Month, Stats for the Last Month

image courtesy of Gerd Altmann via pixabay.com

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Dark Moon

Pluto, Saturn, Neptune, Chiron, Uranus Retrograde

Partly cloudy and pleasant

I hope you had a good weekend. If you didn’t have a chance to read the Community Tarot Reading for the week, you can do so here.

Friday actually brightened up and turned out to be sunny and lovely.

I was sad to hear that Dame Maggie Smith died. I admired her work tremendously.

On Friday morning, I reworked the poem, and kept reworking it most of the day. Cut lines, rearranged things, worked on sonics, worked on imagery.

I put the proofreading changes into the reading program, and followed up on some publicity. I worked on the author interview questions. I need to pull a vivid quote from the book itself and, of course, I am blanking out. I’m trying to skim the galleys to see if I can come up with the right quote.

Did a library run, dropped our ballots for the special election in the ballot box at City Hall, mailed a few things at the post office. Turned around a medium coverage.

Sat in the sun reading for a little bit, enjoying that it turned into a beautiful day.

The show is cast and goes into rehearsals shortly. This week, we are supposed to have a production meeting with the director, the producer, the sound designer, the composer, and me. Hopefully, I can get any necessary rewrites done before going in-studio. Otherwise, the rewrites have to wait until after. The meeting’s been scheduled for tomorrow afternoon (my time), so at least I have a little bit of time to prep.

Bea is trying to get Charlotte to play with her, and Charlotte is perplexed. It’s kind of hilarious.

Saturday morning started foggy, but wound up pretty. Weird dreams, between these two eclipses, and with Neptune retrograde.

Changed the beds, switched out the lace curtains for the spiderweb curtains, put up the small Halloween tree, put up a good portion of the decorations. I wasn’t sure I wanted a Halloween tree, so I picked up a few very inexpensive items over the past month or so, and we’ll see. I’m embellishing the area around it with some of our other pieces. I mean, nothing in our autumn décor repertoire is highly expensive, just things we enjoy.

The spiderweb curtains make a huge difference in the quality of light, even though they let in a good bit of it. It’s the first time I have them up in my office, and it makes a big difference.

I felt guilty enjoying the sunshine when so much of the southeast is suffering from Hurricane Helene. The devastation is terrifying. There’s so little I can do, but I will find something to do and then do it. I don’t like to yap about it on social media and the like, because then it feels performative, rather than doing what needs to be done because it needs to be done. I am sharing resources whenever I can, hoping it will help, and trying to contact people I know in the area.

Worked and reworked the poem. Rehearsed it, until I felt good about it. Grabbed a few small coverages for Monday, which is still part of the pay period.

Sunday morning, Bea went exploring farther and something scared her, because she came flying back into her room and didn’t emerge for the rest of the day. It may have been that she made it all the way to the kitchen and Willa was, once again, a brat.

I read in the morning, rehearsed the poem a few times, packed up my stuff, and headed for The Mount. It was lovely day to drive, and I got there in plenty of time. Living up to being perpetually early for everything.

We had to bring our own chairs and blankets – we were out in the dell behind the stables, which is nice, except for the bugs. I drenched myself in Deep Woods Off.  Had some good chats with familiar faces, and there were some new people to the group, welcomed, as always, with friendliness. One of the poets turned out to be a musician I know from tarot group! I gave out information for the grant and for the reading, as appropriate.

The poems were all interesting and the commitment of the poets and the listeners is always a joy. It’s as much of a pleasure to listen as it is to read. Well, for me, it’s ALWAYS more of a pleasure to listen than to read, but working with Word X Word is helping me get more grounded when I have to read my own work.

On the way home, I stopped at Chocolate Springs in Lenox and treated myself to a small hot chocolate. I sat outside on a bench and just enjoyed myself.

Home, unloaded everything, cooked dinner.

I did quite a bit of reading this weekend. I read a couple of books on journal writing. One was just awful. It wasn’t about journal writing but about list making, and not particularly useful techniques for lists. The other was better, but still too results-oriented rather than process-oriented.

I read MONADNOCK JOURNAL, published in 1975 by Richard F. Merrifield, who used to write a column in the Keene, NH papers. It was a thoughtful read. Two of his quotes especially resonated:

“There is magic in the commonest object.” (p. 4).

“To read only for speed is like going through the Louvre on a motorcycle.” (p. 26).

I read several Martha Grimes books. THE JERSALUM INN is the book where, I think, it takes the turn from parody/satire to something more serious, at least as far as character development. I liked this book better than others, although the pool/billiards/snooker details didn’t quite track (and then I remembered my friend Diane’s remark that one of the books got those details wrong and it put her off the series). I started THE DEER LEAP and had to put it down because of the animal murders. Even though they weren’t graphic, it was too much. I read HELP THE POOR STRUGGLER, which, again, plot-wise, was interesting. Something that I’m noticing now that I don’t remember from the earlier reads is that I get a sense she doesn’t like the female characters very much in her books. They are broadly drawn, with little nuance.  And the “good” ones are too often punished with grisly deaths.

At some point last week, I read THE WAY OF ALL FISH, not part of this series, that’s definitely satire/parody, of the publishing industry. It was fun, but it also sometimes read like an extended skit that was written with the primary intent to sell film rights. I don’t know if that ever happened (and I’m too lazy to look it up). Perhaps it’s the cynicism of my script analyst work that makes me see it through that lens.

It’s all very interesting from a craft perspective, and she’s been selling well since the first book, so there’s something that’s engaging the audience. My mom is reading the series for the first time, and enjoys the first book, at least so far. She likes the mix of old-fashioned style murder mystery setting (she’s a fan of the MIDSOMER MURDER series) with modern issues (although the series starts in the 1980’s, way past “modern” but feels like a few months ago to us in some ways). I’m learning what I can, and dissecting what is working and what I question and why.

Slept pretty well into Monday, although still with wild dreams. It’s still dark at 6, which makes the next few months of going to the laundromat less fun. I mean, the laundromat doesn’t usually equate fun, but you know what I mean.

I had an idea starting to form, mostly characters making suggestions, and I’m not sure what it will be. Well, it’s trying to create the what, it’s more the “when.” It needs to take a number. That doesn’t stop me from making notes, though. And I made a bunch of notes, which took longer than expected, because I had to Look Things Up. I have the central characters and the shape of what I want to explore, thematically (usually themes develop later). I now have to let those percolate for however long they need in order to form the plot.

I got an email out about the reading to the poets, so everyone knows what’s expected. One of them is driving east from Colorado, and I wanted to make sure I got the information to her before she got on the road.

We got great news from Cape Cod! The Governor has nixed the machine gun range near Bourne. Woo-hoo! It’s completely unnecessary, would have clear cut 170 acres of forest, AND the EPA’s assessment was that it would do irreparable damage to the already fragile water supply. Even though I don’t live on that side of the state anymore, I wrote a lot of letters to a lot of elected officials everywhere asking them not to allow this. The army kept changing parameters trying to get away with a smaller vision and then grow into the bigger one, but the whole thing is gone. Until the next time they try to push for it.

Phew!

Turned around 7 small coverages in the afternoon and evening, getting me close to my desired earnings for the pay period, and better than I thought I would do. In the midst of that, the company sent out an email that they are, as of today, no longer giving “volume bonuses.” In previous months, if a reader covered a particular number of scripts in a month (not that I ever had any idea of that elusive number), the reader received a bonus for taking on that amount of work. However, since they’ve cut pay, all of us are now forced to take on more work than is comfortable to survive and make even close to what we used to make – so they are cutting the volume bonus. I only do this part time (too much time, in my opinion, but needs must), so it was rare I got a volume bonus, although it happened a few times in the past months, since we had to take on more volume to make less than what we used to make. Very disheartening to get that kind of an email when I’m working my tail off to hit a certain earnings mark.

Yet another indication that looking for a client or clients to replace this one is the right choice. Let’s hope I can land it/them in the next couple of months.

Good thing I got everything in early in the evening, because we had a Spectrum outage for internet, phone, and tv for several hours overnight. I have internet only with Spectrum, and I’m sure it’s tied to the Verizon outage, since they’re on the same network. But it would have made it impossible to get in my work on time.

I managed to grab a handful of scripts for the next few days. There should have been many more in the queue with yesterday’s contest deadline. There’s another deadline today, so we’ll see what comes in today and tomorrow.

I had a heck of a time getting to sleep, but once I did, I slept reasonably well.

Let’s do our numbers for September, shall we?

New Material:               31,372

Edits:                                 34,414

Adaptation:                    11,144

Client Work:                  22,354

Marketing:                      7 hours

Library Tour                    4 hours

Misc.                                 12 hours

Let’s analyze the meanings.

New material: Pretty straightforward. Stuff that hadn’t been written before, and the number is fairly low. I didn’t do much knew writing this month. I wrote a new poem, and some chapters on VICIOUS CRITIC, and 36 pages of a new screenplay, along with blogging and the like. The new material number should be stronger in October, especially with the residency week tucked in there.

Editing was an okay number, pretty evenly balanced with the new work, even though much of the editing was on work begun last month or earlier. I edited the poem (multiple times), I edited my friend’s project, I edited a full-length play, and a one-act. And started work on STRANGERS IN THE SNOW.  And the newsletter, which certainly needed it.

The Adaptation number made sense, because I finished adapting the VICIOUS CRITIC episodes, and have moved into drafting fresh material. The number will go back up later in the year when I adapt ANGEL HUNT, but for now, it’s fine.

Client work was low, even though it was spread across several clients. And the ratio of work to payment is too low for my needs. Again, this is a pattern over the months I’ve been tracking my stats. I’m underpaid, mostly because I can’t control the rate from my largest freelance client. Ergo, I need to replace that client, and have not yet been able to do so. Part of that is needing to pitch more, for which I have to block out time, which is difficult when I’m working additional hours for decreasing pay just to survive. It’s a self-defeating loop I need to break. It may mean just putting in a bunch of extra pitching hours, whether I’m tired or not. I’ve been tired before; I can be tired again for a few months if it means leading to something better.

Marketing was seven hours. A little low, and I’m wondering if maybe I forgot to list some of the hours, because it feels like I did more. Or maybe I’m getting more efficient with it. Most of that was for the reading next week, with a little bit for the Topic Workbooks and Nina Bell.

The Library Tour to distribute the A4A grant information was about 4 hours. It was fun just to be fun, served the purpose, and opened some doors and new ideas for me. That time and driving will have a long-term benefit over a period of months and years, I think.

The Miscellaneous category had to do with meetings, readings, performance, and other projects that don’t really fit into any other category but also had time devoted to them. It’s a reasonable amount of time for a month.

The non-writing facets, still connected to work but not the physical writing, took up about 23 hours, or nearly one entire day over the full month. That’s reasonable. In a few months, I’ll have some more data to see how the marketing pays off, and where placement gets the most return. I have to create a budget next year for paid advertising. Even if it’s a small one, it’s a necessary expense.

I’m taking my mom to get her COVID shot this morning, at a clinic set up nearby for that purpose. I am waiting until mid-November to schedule mine – I can actually block off a few days for the shot to take me down. I also have to run some errands on the way back. I hope to get some writing done (although that’s doubtful). I have to get my book review out the door before WE go out the door. I have some scripts to turn around this afternoon, and can hopefully grab more for the week. I need to prep for tomorrow’s production meeting.

I might even be able to make yoga tonight.

Have a good one!