Audience

The more I think about my problems making money from my creative efforts the more I realise that my problem is an audience. Or rather, the lack of an audience.

My writing is weird, I know that, and that means that there isn’t a mass market audience for it. There doesn’t have to be. The world is huge and a lot of it speaks English. Even a small audience by proportion is massive in terms of actual numbers. So I just need to find my audience. Only one problem. I have no idea how to find an audience. I’d blame my budget of zero money but I wouldn’t know where to spend the money if I had it.

In the golden age of blogging, when the internet was yet young, a blog was the thing you used to snag your audience. You needed something to say, an interesting point of view to say it from, and some actual skill as a writer (pick any two out of three if you’re white and good-looking, or rich, or you know a journalist). You’d temp them in with some free words and wait until the London media types noticed you. The Guardian or the Independent would do a profile.Then before you know it you’ve got a book deal, and off you run with a newly minted career as an author. If you blog it, they will come.

Back then I didn’t have anything to say. Which is ridiculous because I always have something to say. It would be more accurate to say that I didn’t have anything coherent or entertaining to say and I was convinced that no-one wanted to hear what life is like when you’re poor, fat and mentally ill. Which, to be fair to myself, was probably true. It took me a long time to find stories that I wanted to tell.

So how does one find an audience? I know it’s possible. There are authors, and podcasters, and tick-tockers, and youtubers out there building themselves an audience right now. Surely I can do it too. Unless it’s about popularity.

It’s about popularity isn’t it? I’m doomed. I’ve never known how to be popular.

New Stuff

I have a new author website and I’ve posted a potentially risky blog post there.

also contains a strong vein of dark humour that is laugh out loud funny in places. What do you mean people don’t like funny sex scenes? Have you seen sex? It’s hilarious.

What my query letter would say if I wasn’t a coward

So go and have a look at it before I chicken out and take it down.

When you have so many things to do that you end up doing nothing.

Ok, not exactly nothing, but I haven’t finished anything. I normally put a blog post up on a Sunday but this week I didn’t because I was too busy writing three blog posts for a new blog project. None of those posts are ready. The new blog isn’t ready. I also haven’t finished the planning for NaNoWriMo 2019, or the editing of Project Kindness or the outline of Project Academy.

I’m sitting here in a desperate frenzy of not doing the new things that I decided to do as displacement activity but also not doing any things that I was avoiding doing. I can’t decide which thing to focus on and when I pick one at random and try to force the issue I find that I either can’t focus on it or I can and it’s shit.

I feel like a clockwork device wound up too tightly but with the spring jammed in place. I can’t release the tension but I keep winding because I need to get something done. I need to get anything done. I need to justify my worthless existence by doing something.

But I’m not doing anything. I’m just getting increasingly restless and frustrated and upset. I’m now so restless that there’s roughly zero chance of me actually being able to focus enough to write the serious and factual blog posts that I wanted to write.

I’m going to play a stupid computer game because it seems better than tearing my own face off with my fingernails which is what I feel like doing. But later, when I’ve calmed down, I’m going to feel like it was a terrible waste of time.

Sunday Update 02/06

This was going to be a post about The Mummy (the recent one which is currently on Netflix). I was going to do an in depth look at the plot structure and talk about how I think some of the story telling decisions lead to it being less successful than expected and potentially putting the kibosh on Universal’s proposed “Dark Universe”.

Then I got distracted by thinking about some of the writing difficulties I’ve had this week and how I probably needed to talk about that instead. I also realised that If I put off talking about The Mummy it gives anyone who’s interested the chance to watch it themselves and see if they agree with me.

So that’s your homework. Watch The Mummy (the 2017 one with Tom Cruise not the 1999 one with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, or the 1959 one with Christopher Lee, or the 1932  one with Boris Karloff).

This week I have actually done some writing and some writing adjacent activity and I’ve been dealing with a couple of recurrent problems. One is a technical writing problem, well a bunch of problems really. The other is an extremely on brand confidence/panic problem.

Let’s talk about the technical problems. I’ve been back at the rewrites of the big fight scene at the end of Project Kindness. It’s not the only thing stopping me from finishing Project Kindness but it is the main thing. Normally I’d count fight scene amongst the things I’m good at but this one is a special case. I’m unsure about how to handle almost everything about it.

The first problem, which I’ve mentioned before, is that it’s a super important scene. There’s a lot of story stuff that has to come together at the same time.

The second problem is how many of the cast are present. There’s three people participating in the fight and a bunch of people watching. One of the participants and four of the spectators have been PoV (point of view) characters in previous scenes and the spectators have stuff that they need to be doing during the fight. That means that I need to manage multiple PoVs within the scene. There’s nothing stopping me breaking it down into smaller scenes but i don’t have much else going on so it’s hard to cut from the fight to another scene elsewhere and then back to the fight with a different PoV which is how I prefer to switch PoV. And since I’m switching PoV I need to work out which characters to focus on.

The third problem is that I’ve made so many attempts to write this scene that I keep getting lost. Did I actually write that bit or did I only think about writing it? Which of these four slightly different versions of this bit is the best?

The fourth problem is the knowledge base problem. I know what butterfly swords look like but I can’t rely on my readers knowing that. How much detail do they need in order to know what’s going on and at what point does all the detail become overwhelming? Am I introducing some of this stuff too late? Should I go back and add additional fight scenes earlier on so that I’m not dumping a bunch of exposition this late in the story?

The non-technical problem I’ve had is with a piece of commissioned writing. It’s a guest blog that I haven’t talked about much because I didn’t want to jinx it. It’s been finished for 3 days now but I’ve been having trouble letting go and sending it in. At first I thought the problem was that it was too long and didn’t have a good title but gradually it became clear that the real problem is my twin fears of rejection and fucking up. I’m scared that it’s no good, or that it’s not what they want, or that they just won’t like it. I’m scared that I’ve written it so badly that they won’t even tell me to rewrite it.

I suspect that it’s a kind of impostor syndrome. And also an entirely rational scepticism about the possibility of anything ever going well for me. Historically things have not gone well for me. I fail at things a lot. Succeeding at things is almost worse because then I have to do more things and when those additional thing fail it’s even more painful.

I’d love to say that I’ve got some sort of insight on how to deal with this problem but I don’t. I just forced myself to hit send on an email and now I’m writing this blog post as displacement activity so that I don’t drive myself crazy with panic.

Sunday Update 10/02

This week has been weirdly disjointed and ill-omened.

In the middle of the week I slashed two of my fingers open with a bread knife. Not deliberately or anything, just the cost of buying unsliced bread when you’re a Spoonie. My hands shake and spasm without warning, sometimes I’m not fully aware of what I’m doing and I’m often horribly distracted. Trying to get stuff done with two fingers strapped up is a reminder of all the ways in which I am dependant on my hands even though they’re not very reliable. It set the tone for the week.

I’ve written a lot but I feel like somehow none of it counts. I’ve signed an actual contract to do actual paid writing but I’m still half expecting that i’ll fuck it up somehow. There’s no reason why I should mess it up. I’ve got months to finish, I’ve already done more than half the research and it’s related to subjects that I’ve previously written about. I should be able to do it in my sleep. It just that I’m used to things never working out the way that they should.

Slashing my fingers meant that I’ve had to change up the ways that I’ve spent my time this week. I couldn’t play computer games and typing was difficult. I ended up spending time looking for new things to watch on Amazon Prime while crocheting very slowly. I discovered a thing that I’ve already blogged about.

I’ve also spent the week wrestling with the realisation that my Executive Dysfunction isn’t as bad as i think it is and that half of the problem is me not acknowledging the things that I do manage to get done even when I’m constantly fighting the desire to just stay in bed for ever. I’ve written a blog about that too and I’ll probably go up next week.

And then there was the Scapegoat blog. It’s been one of those weird things where I wrote something that seemed grimly entertaining to me but clearly seems horribly traumatic to everyone who’s spoken to me about it. I want to say, “Hey lighten up. It wasn’t serious. Nobody died, nobody got injured, it’s not like it was child abuse or anything.” but I’m worried that if I say that out loud someone will tell me that it actually was and that’s going to make talking to my mother really awkward.

If you want to donate so I can buy better plasters, or just pay for the coffee that keeps me awake and watching Boris Karloff, you can do it via my Kofi link.

Belated Sunday update for 28/10

I wrote a Sunday update post as usual but I threw it out because it just devolved into a rant about injustice all triggered by the additional pain I’m in because of my broken writing chair. I don’t like myself very much at the best of times but I hate who I become when I’m in that much pain.

I genuinely do not know what I’m going to do about writing. I’m always in pain but there’s only so much of it I can ignore. I need to be relatively comfortable in order to write anything other than semi coherent rants. You can’t build a novel on semi coherent rants unless you’re a famous, rich, white guy.

I also don’t know what I’m going to do about this blog. While I can write it in shorter bursts there’s kind of no point if I’m not writing anything else.

Anyway. Here’s my Ko-Fi link if you have a desperate urge to send me money.

Sunday Update 26/08

I’ve decided that I need to get back into regular blogging. I’m starting with a weekly update on the… um, usual stuff that I update on. Lets see how many weeks I can keep it up for.

It’s official that I won’t be pitching at Bloody Scotland this year. I got the rejection email this week. As I previously said I’m not too upset about it because the novel I was going to pitch was one I felt in two minds about actually finishing.

I am back working on the sexy spy novel that I’ve nicknamed Project Kindness. Coming back to it after a break has been a weird experience. I have enough distance now that it no longer feels like something I wrote and that means it feels like I’m editing someone else’s work. However I’m still too close to it to be sure which bits of it, if any, are actually good.

Much of the rewriting and editing on Project Kindness is of the deeply finicky and technical type. I’m constantly wondering which order to put the scenes, when to switch point of view characters or jump from a-plot to b-plot and exactly where to cut each scene for the maximum impact when we come back to those characters.

I’m also still looking forward to NaNoWriMo this year. As previously stated I’m hoping to work on a YA (Young Adult) novel so that I can finally have a novel I can show to my kids. My previous attempts to write YA have been failures due to my stories running away from me. Or in one case to two characters in their 40s deciding that this was the book they were going to consummate a 7 year long flirtation in.

In non-writing related news I’ve decided to try spinning. I already crochet and I’ve been known to knit but this is my first attempt at spinning. I ordered a drop spindle kit that came with some carded fleece ready to spin and today was my first try.

OH MY GOD I suck at spinning. I really suck at it. It’s been a long time since I tried a new craft and discovered that I had zero aptitude for it. It’s kind of embarrassing to be this bad at the foundational fiber art. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying though. Stay tuned for future updates and possibly photographs of my cack handed attempts at producing yarn.

This week I also had not one, but two phone calls from my mother that had me running to Google. It happens occasionally that she phones me talking such utter tripe that I’m convinced that she’s flipped. Sometimes she just has a bee in her bonnet as a result of uncritical newspaper reading. Other times a quick google will reveal that she’s right-ish she’s just doing her usual thing of communicating the facts in entirely the wrong order or using language usually associated with people who need a lot of medication to cope with reality.

Once I’d done my googling and decoded what she was saying it became clear that the area she lives is suffering an infestation of “corn ticks” (so called because the engorged ticks look like corn kernels) and that she’s allergic to the ticks and they’re causing lung inflammation. All that explains why last week she phoned me up to cough at me so badly that I was worried I’d have to call her an ambulance.

No further news on my ongoing attempts to stockpile enough food to survive Brexit. See you next week if I don’t see you before.

Reasons why I’m not writing

Ok, technically I am writing because I’m writing this blog post but I should be working on my novel and I’m not because…

In this case I have a very specific plot hole that needs filling. It’s not a plot hole in the ‘oh my God my plot doesn’t work’ sense. It’s the plot equivalent of a pothole in a road. It still needs fixing if I want my readers to have a smooth ride but it’s not major building work.

You’d think that would make it easier to fix, wouldn’t you? Just patch over it with the narrative equivalent of bitchumen and go onto the next scene. But the problem with this sort of fix is that it needs to be seamless. I have to slot a little scene-ette into an already existing scene without breaking the scene or losing the mood.

Specifically I need one character to call another character so that they can have the brief conversation that will signal to the audience that they are moving beyond a disagreement. I can’t skip the scene because it needs to be resolved. I can’t cut out the disagreement because other stuff relies on it. And I can’t work out why that one character would pick up the phone rather than fuming silently about it. She tends to be a self sufficient silent fumer. She needs a reason to call.

My mind is a blank. There are literally millions of things that could precipitate that call but instead of coming up with one my brain is doing the brain equivalent of turning circles on the spot while singing snatches of every song I’ve heard in the last month.

ME: Ok so could she have found something in the files?

MY BRAIN: the last, the last, the last…

ME: But seriously there’s bound to be stuff in there that she’d need to talk about

MY BRAIN: How big, how blue, how beautiful…

ME: That way I could set up the later revelations…

MY BRAIN: Somebody once told me…

ME: Oh for fucks sake

So… Chocolate? I’m thinking chocolate. And possibly booze. And maybe a brain transplant.

 

If you have enjoyed this pointless rant maybe you’d like to support this blog by buying me a coffee with Ko-Fi. Or alternatively today is the last day that you can buy stuff in the Shop of Doom.

Epic displacement activity

In my ongoing quest to avoid rewriting part 3 of my current novel in progress I have finally discovered the ultimate strategy. I set up an online business.

I set up an online shop. I designed t-shirts, mugs and tote bags. I put together a website. I may even add a blog to that website so that I’ll have two blogs to avoid writing for while I’m also avoiding writing my novel. With so much work to avoid I’m bound to accidentally get stuff done.

One thing that I have proved is that I have to stop saying that I lack all the skills necessary to be an an indie author. If I can design a pleasing t-shirt that people will actually buy then I can design a book cover that will persuade people to read the blurb.

Working on the designs did make me think that maybe I should post more visual stuff here. So far I’ve posted a lot of words and not much else but other people’s blogs usually seem to have more pictures or videos. Would that be an annoying and pointless change or would it be refreshing and welcome? Or both to different readers?

Anyway, here’s a link to the shop:

Madame Q’s Shop of Doom

And here’s a picture that you can buy on a t-shirt.

Apology in advance

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to update properly for the next couple of weeks. I suspect that my depression is acting up. If that’s the case the best way to deal with it is to acknowledge that it’s happening and not to try and push through it.

Of course I might be worrying over nothing and I’ll be back to normal next week. Either way I’ll be back posting lengthy and hopefully humorous rants about my terrible life before too long.