Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

Progress re: focus (or: diminishing returns)

With regard to my recent push to try to jump-start my writing and get these books written quickly (and well), as detailed in my blog post the other day, I wanted to give you an update. This chart spells it out pretty well, but I’ll go into a little more detail below:

As you can see, I got a lot of writing done on Tuesday. Before I started, I had been on a pretty-fully-reversed sleep schedule, going to bed around 8AM and sleeping 8 hours. I wrote that long blog post between 2AM and 4AM, basically “mid-afternoon” for me, and then got started writing. I took my last two modafinil that day, to stay awake until 8/9PM, with the intention of then sleeping all night and continuing the week on a proper daytime schedule. The first day went well, as you can see. My average words/hour rate was consistently above 800 words/hour (which is what I’ve been averaging across my last several books) and frequently at 1k words/hour. In part, I’m confident this is because in addition to being a drug for narcolepsy (let me stay awake), modafinil is a sort of “smart pill” which can enhance one’s mental focus. I ended up writing 4 of the 20 chapters I needed to finish the vampire duology.

When the 2nd pill wore off and I got tired right on schedule, I tried going to bed, but I couldn’t get to sleep. After about an hour of that, I tried some mild exercise for about an hour, then tried again to go to sleep. I ended up getting a little over 3 hours of sleep, and was wide awake but feeling odd/off before 2AM. I put myself back to work, but my writing speed was maxing out at 800 words/hour, and I kept distracting myself with other tasks, sometimes for hours at a time. Then at around 8:3oAM, I was overcome with sleepiness. I went to bed. Slept 4-5 hours. My pace (and distractibility) were the same after sleeping, though I tried to keep myself working most of the afternoon and evening. By the end of the day I’d only finished writing 2 more chapters.

By Wednesday night it was clear to me that rather than shifting myself back to a diurnal schedule, I’d merely broken my sleep cycle in two – I slept another 4-5 hours at night, and woke in the early morning. As distractible as I’d been with all the other things I could do on my home computer, I decided to try heading to Starbucks where I (sometimes? often?) have better luck keeping focused. My writing pace, even with the good caffeine & sugar & eye candy and without much to distract me from the task at hand, was under 500 words/hour. I nearly failed to finish a single chapter before giving up and going home – where I almost immediately went to bed. And slept 4-5 more hours, waking up without enough time to get any writing done before I had to make dinner and go with Mandy to a Phoenix Comicon meeting. When we got home, I logged in to Star Trek Online for their 2-year anniversary event (free new ship for everyone!), and didn’t get any more writing done before heading to bed around 1AM. I only got 1 chapter written, yesterday.

So, that’s where I’m at. I slept from 1AM to 5AM and expect to sleep from 10AM or 11AM to 3PM or 4PM – at which time I’ll need to go get started making dinner, followed by having a Friday night with my wife. Worst case for this (barring no writing) is that I go write for the next 3 hours, it goes as slow or slower than yesterday, and my word count for the day goes down by half yet again. On this trajectory I’m facing Zeno’s paradox and will never reach the end of these books.

What I really need is 3 more of those 10k+word days. Quick, someone get me more smart pills! At the very least, this sleep thing is screwing up my ability to write for any sustained period, and is eating some of the best writing hours from the middle of the day.

Book Pricing update, February 2012

Total eBook sales for January 2012 were under $10and about half of that was for books that have already “earned out”, and there were no paperback sales, so none of my book prices have changed from last month.

The prices for my books are: paperback / ebook:

The possibilities of focus

I’ve been so scatterbrained, lately. Depressed, for sure, which has led to months without significant work, but which has also led to this recent paucity of focus. I spent most of 2011 reading, researching, and planning toward writing my vampire duology, with the intention of being able to write both books rather quickly – possibly within November, for NaNoWriMo. I wrote roughly half of the two books (most of one, and part of the other) in November, and have eked out another 6 chapters or so for them since then, but I still have about 20 chapters remaining to write.

There’s so much work yet to be done on these books. Beyond the 60+ good hours of writing it will take to finish the first drafts, there’s initial editing so I can send to my Beta Readers, then days or weeks waiting for them to get back to me with their feedback, then re-writes and edits based on that feedback and possibly (if I can convince anyone to re-read the books so quickly) a second round of the same. Once I’ve got the basic text in good shape I’ve got to do another close read (copyediting) before I begin recording the audio version – a step which always finds new errors and awkward sentences/dialogue in the text, and which I prefer to do before publishing, when possible. I’ve got to do the interior layout, which shouldn’t be too difficult at this point and with all the experience I have, but I’ve also got to design the cover in three ways, for each individual eBook as well as for the paper/limited-edition/flipbook, hopefully all as a single image. I’ve got to do fundraising (possibly via Kickstarter) to pay for the paper edition, which almost certainly takes weeks or more. Actually podcasting the audio version may take up to a year, though it’s the hundreds of hours of recording, editing, and assembling them which I’ll want to have done before publication. After all that, getting the eBooks ready will be a snap.

Why am I thinking about all this? I just noticed January has slipped away, almost without my notice, and February is at hand. Tomorrow I’ll process the data on January eBook sales and (possibly) update the prices on some of my books/eBooks, according to the formula I rolled out at the start of the year. This has reminded me that Phoenix Comicon is coming up at the end of May; hopefully the significantly lower prices this model affords my paperbacks will result in increased sales at Comicon. This has led me inexorably to the idea that, if possible, I’d like to have my vampire duology flipbook on hand and for sale at the Phoenix Comicon. Which led to thinking about everything in that last paragraph, and more.

Part of the ‘more’ is all the other projects I’ve been working on lately, in my lack of focus, especially the interactive book on writing and publishing. I mentioned on Google+ last night that, in addition to beginning to write that book, I spent some time mapping out its (quite complex) hypertext structure; it’s intended to be read in a non-linear way, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book as well as a cross between a memoir and a how-to guide for independent writing and publishing, and it’s been percolating up through my mind for years. At the current stage of mapping and note-making, I’ve already got forty-plus chapters/chunks started; if no more occur to me, and they’re each the 1500+word chunks they’ve been becoming so far, it’s already shaping up to be book-length, complex, and interesting. I’ve got at least another 60 hours of work just writing the thing, and possibly over 100 hours, the way it’s been going.

(I won’t even mention each of the other projects I’ve had queueing up and being worked on by my scattered thoughts and efforts, except to say that if I continue on as I am, none of them -certainly not the vampire books- will be finished by Comicon.)

According to my calculations, if I seriously applied myself, I could finish the first draft of the vampire duology in six or eight solid days of work, since I’ve already got it all well-planned and developed. The same is roughly true of the book on publishing; six to ten long, hard days of dedicated work and I could have a first draft complete, from where I’ve already got it. The work would be intense, draining work, and would require me to (somehow) overcome the worst elements of my own insanity; what I have been trying to figure out is whether, if I actually applied myself and accomplished those things, would I have the time needed to get either (or preferably both) projects ready for sale in time for Phoenix Comicon. All that extra work I listed off in the second paragraph – can it be completed and the finished books delivered to my hands before the end of May? And if so, is it worth it to me to try to do so?

If I set myself to these tasks/goals, to this deadline, the aspect most at risk for being potentially short-changed is the editing/rewrites. Getting people, even family and close friends, to read a single book and give feedback (even just basic spelling & grammar, to say nothing of content) in as little as a week or two tends to be a huge fight and to carry a significant attrition rate. I dread sending out two (or worse, three) books with the intention of getting meaningful feedback on any limited timeline, for free. I don’t know how long professional editors would take to do the work, but I know I can’t afford such a thing right now. There are some other parts of the work I can accomplish while waiting for feedback, such as cover design, or working on the other title, but if I expect to incorporate any meaningful changes to the text, the bigger time-sink of recording the audiobook has to wait. I can probably start fundraising before completing the final edits of the text, which helps even out the timeline, some.

Let’s see what the hard deadline would be… Phoenix Comicon runs May 24-27 (Memorial Day Weekend, except without the Memorial Day), which means I’d want to have any items for sale there on hand no later than Tuesday the 22nd, for booth setup Wednesday. LSI typically takes about a week from when I send them the files before they approve a title for printing, then another 3-5 days to print, then I have them shipped via UPS Ground (because shipping heavy things like cases of books any faster is prohibitively expensive), so to be conservative I need to submit the files three weeks before I need the books on hand, at the latest. That means I have to have the book ready for print on or before May 1st.

Yow. 90 days.

If I go mad (in a good, hard-working way) for the next couple/few weeks, I can finish at least the vampire books by the end of next week, and possibly all three books the week after that, and get them to my Beta Readers before mid-February. I’ll need not less than a week after I think I’m done editing the book to work through the audio version, probably at least two weeks, plus time to make final changes to the layouts & text after that, so I should say I need to be done polishing the text by mid-April. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Of course, if I continue to have trouble focusing, trouble writing for long periods, or writing at reasonable rates, even with significant daily work it could take me until mid-March to finish the first drafts. Ugh.

What if I need significant re-writes? These books are important to me. Important that they express what I want them to express, even to casual readers. Not so important that they read like mainstream fiction… they’re not even in the same realm as that. But important to me that they’re good, that they do what they set out to do. Tell the stories they were meant to tell. I don’t know. I don’t really even know how to do re-writes. (Ooh; I’ve just added another chapter/chunk’s beginning to the book on writing/publishing, about my editing/rewriting process, or lack thereof.) If my Beta Readers all come back to me saying something like “we don’t really believe Emily is in love with Nicholas; you have to show it, make us feel it, it isn’t there”, or “we couldn’t buy in to anything Nicholas and his group were doing; it was obvious you disagreed with everything he had to say or tried to do”, I may just have a total breakdown, as that would mean most everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish (in one of the books) I had failed at, compromising the work straight to the core. I might have to take another year on the re-writes, or I might just publish as-is, with the admission that I’m a shitty writer… I don’t know where my emotional collapse would leave me, after excellent feedback like that. (Although, really, I’m just kidding myself with ideas like that; I have never in my life received feedback of that caliber. I don’t know whether it’s because the people reading my books understand my intent and I’m actually doing what I meant to do, or whether my goals were so far beyond the beyond that no one even know what was wrong, and that I’ve secretly, quietly, been a dismal failure all these years. (On the other hand, based on the comments in the worst of my reviews, the one and two star reviews, the single-sentence reviews, the reviews from people who admit they quit reading in under 50 pages… the things those people hate about them are generally all the things that were so important to me to accomplish, or were at least intentional. Not failures of writing, but failure of readers to appreciate what the author was setting out to do. The polarizing effect of my work has become quite encouraging, lately.)) I feel like time is my enemy, at times.

Still, even with worst-case responses, if I can get any meaningful feedback out of people within a month of sending them my books, even that should give me enough time to accomplish significant rewrites, if necessary. Whole chapters, or plot-lines, could be replaced in the time remaining… So I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do. Start applying myself. Intensely. Finish three books’ first drafts in the next three weeks, and have them ready for publication within the next three months.

I’d be tempted to find some money in the budget to order a bunch of modafinil, but I suspect that, if all goes to plan, I’ll be done (or very nearly done) with the most intense part of the work before the drugs arrived from my international pharmacy. If I didn’t have an unnatural aversion to 1) seeing doctors and 2) dishonesty, I’d be much better off convincing a local doctor to write me a prescription for the stuff, and picking it up at my local pharmacy the same day. Somehow, violating federal and international laws bothers me less than either of the things involved in obtaining modafinil the way I’m supposed to. Oh, well. If I had modafinil on hand, I wouldn’t have even had to question any of this, as getting this level of work done would become nearly trivial. *sigh*

I’d better go get to work.

Debt pay down update, 1/2012

I ran the numbers about a day earlier than I normally do, on 1/30 instead of 1/31, but no payments are going through in the next day, so these numbers are effectively accurate. As I blogged about a year ago, I like to take a snapshot of our debts once a year, at the end of January. I also pay quite close attention to it all year, but these snapshots provide a nice point of comparison to see how much progress is being made year-over-year. In Fall of 2010 I also began keeping a huge spreadsheet with the balance, payment, principal payment, and interest payment for all our debt accounts, as reported on each month’s statements, and have used it to help planning our payment stacking, projected payoffs, budgets, savings, and for forecasting how changes, large purchases, et cetera will affect everything over time. Hooray, spreadsheets. This year is the first year I have a full year’s worth of data in the spreadsheet, so I have an extra number or two to share.

First off, the old numbers: Last year at this time we owed $29,439 in consumer debt (including our auto loan) and $39,840 in student loans, for a total of $69,279 in debt. When I posted last year, we’d just paid off one of our cars; a few months later we sold it to my sister. This year we’ve paid off another credit card, and expect to pay off our remaining car in March – plus we replaced two computers, which died, with an iPad 2 and a new Macbook Pro, and decided to buy an HDTV for my birthday. We’ve been getting far enough ahead on our debt payments that I’ve been able to add line items to the budget for things like future computer replacements, new tires (bought a full set in the Fall) every couple of years, vehicle license tax, and other annual-or-less-frequent expenses we’d always had to treat as an unexpected/emergency expense. This is a huge relief, and it’s nice to see our savings account growing and know that the next time a tire blows out or a computer fails, we’ve literally got money in the bank to pay for repairs or replacements. Not everything is covered by this, yet, but we’re a lot, lot, lot better off now than we once were in not just being able to afford living expenses but to plan for those big, rare costs. Of course, those budget items bit into the debt stacking and are eating the car payments from my sister entirely, so we didn’t pay down our debt as much in the last year as we did the year before. Here are the new numbers: Our outstanding consumer debt (including the car) is $21,855 and we owe $38,797 in student loans, for a total debt of $60,652. This means that since last year, we paid our debt down by $8,627, which is still quite a nice amount, even though it is only 57% of last year’s phenomenal number.

Since I have the spreadsheet full of data, I can also give a few other numbers. For the calendar year of 2011, based on numbers from the statements received in 2011 (which is to say that the following numbers represent a slightly different period and may actually represent several different periods): We paid roughly $10,268 towards the principal owed across all our accounts, and we paid roughly $6,488 in interest. Of that, $2,128 was student loan interest, which is tax deductible. If we want to look on the brightest, most skewed side of life, we can pretend that means we only paid an effective 6.15% interest rate on the $70,795 we owed in January 2011, over the course of 2011. On the other, more pessimistic hand, we paid nearly as much in interest in 2011 as our outstanding debt went down from 1/31/2011 to 1/30/2012. Still, we’re making headway.

Potentially big things ahead: We should hear within the next month (or two…) about whether Mandy’s application for a teach abroad program in Japan was accepted. If it is, this will incur some up-front costs (we’ve already set aside the known program costs) and some large expenses in the late summer (airfare for myself, plus living expenses for the first month there), but on the whole it will be a great experience and a good thing for our budget. Unless the economies of the US and Japan experience some radical and unexpected adjustments in the next couple of years, the pay for the position will comfortably pay for our living expenses in Japan while allowing us to pay down our debt significantly faster than we currently do, even accounting for the cost of currency conversions. If we don’t end up going to Japan, the money we’ve got planned for it will likely go toward taking a couple of road trips this summer, at least to visit Mandy’s family in Wyoming, and possibly to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida. Either way, we should still end up paying down our debt by approximately $9k-$11k, or possibly more.

Things change. Things always change. I can’t be certain what the next few years will hold. Barring a lot of unknown unknowns, though, we expect to have our consumer debt paid off by mid-2014, and it looks like the student loan payoff has slipped to mid-2017. These figures are both about six months further out than I was projecting when I posted about all this stuff at this time last year, and it’s because of all the stuff I’ve added to the budget (along with the as-yet-unbudgeted versions of same, such as replacing our computers & tires). A little of it is in “disposable/entertainment” categories, but a lot of it is simply the things we were going to have to pay for anyway but hadn’t managed to plan for before. The tires, the VLT, oil changes & misc. repairs for the car, plus computer upgrades and replacements, plus most of the costs of running my business (web hosting & domain registrations, tax license fees, et cetera, plus a little budget for writing in Starbucks) in case for some reason it stops being profitable… And budgeting appropriately for food, clothes, and entertainment (books, music, movies, games, apps) is important to remaining in the black – we’ve lost over 100lbs between the two of us over the last two years, and the clothes costs kept wreaking havoc with our budget. I think we’ve got everything just-about-balanced now, and mid-2014 isn’t that far away. Being totally debt-free in time for our ten-year wedding anniversary in 2017 will be pretty nice, too.

Maybe to celebrate we’ll take out a mortgage on a house.

Scatterbrained, depressed, and overall doing really well, thanks.

Something’s gone wrong, or has at least changed – if not really, entirely for the worse. In some ways, I’ve experienced a reversal, a sort of reversion to an old problem. From problem to problem, I guess, then back again. The new (old) problem is a lack of focus. I’m scatterbrained.

Much of the time, I don’t even have the focus required to work at all, or to blog, or get much of anything done. For much of the last couple of months, though I’ve spent more time playing video games than most anything else, I’ve even had trouble keeping focus there – generally unable to play for more than a couple of hours at a time before my mind wanted to bounce to some other thing. Yet here and there, for a few minutes or an hour at a time, I have been doing work.

One of the problems with this is that nothing is getting finished, which I may address separately, but looming larger to me right now is the ridiculous number of different projects I’m working on (or procrastinating) in these little bits and pieces. I’ll work for an hour, or a chapter, on the vampire novels I’ve been working on for the last year, then later that day (or the next day – the next time I get any work done) I’ll be spontaneously working on some other thing. Outlining a new serial thriller, writing a chapter of my book on publishing, researching or brainstorming for a story I’m developing about an end to senescence, coming up with apps I want to develop on iOS (beyond the interactive comics I initially had in mind), et cetera. I made a list tonight (partially so I don’t lose track of all the different work I’m doing) and have found at least nine different projects I have at various stages of development. (Not including writing things like this blog post, or any thoughts about getting back into visual art.)

At the same time, and almost certainly related, I’ve been experiencing significant irrational emotional distress. Feeling good and bad at the same time. Happy and grateful for all the good things in my life; years of happy marriage, paying down our debt & being financially comfortable, being in the best shape & health of my adult life, free to do the work I want to do on the schedule my insanity allows without external financial or emotional pressure, and so on. Simultaneously I’m going through extremes of emotional overeating, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, full-body physical pain (yes, this is a symptom of depression), bouts of mania, antisocial urges, and a wide variety of effects relating to my libido, among other expressions of my depression. It’s all quite difficult to be going through.

Good mixed with bad. I stated earlier that this was, in a way, a return to an old problem, and that’s true. Working on more projects at once than I knew how to keep up with was something I struggled with in the middle of the last decade, though I don’t recall having quite so many different (big) things going at once. Then there have been periods where I didn’t have any projects going. Even most of last year feels a bit that way, though I know I was doing the work to prepare myself to write my vampire duology, I also look back and see eight-plus months where I didn’t produce anything obvious: No big word counts, very few paintings, no new audiobooks… Except I’m looking at it from my (most self-effacing) perspective, when I see it that way. In reality I put out multiple new books in the Spring, my podcast didn’t fall silent until Summer, I published my first book by another author in the Fall, and then immediately started the writing part of the work on two new books. Which was mostly one project followed by another. Now I’m back to a weird state of being unable to keep my mind from bouncing between quite a lot of things all at once. Good to have so many things going, but also bad that I can’t seem to keep focus on (and sooner finish) any one of them. Good to find myself so inspired by my life and the world, so full of ideas. Bad that I still feel (mostly, I’m working on it) like I don’t have a cause or a “purpose” or some deep passion driving me and driving my work – I’m not trying to “say something” most of the time, certainly not in any overall way, I’m just … expressing my ideas.

Good and bad. Challenged and successful. Engaged and distracted. Frustrated and content. Happy with my life and on the verge of suicide. All mixed up and exactly how I’m supposed to be.

Also: I’ve begun to suspect that perhaps I secretly live somewhere on Mars, or that I’m natively Martian, or something like that. Left to my body’s natural cycles, I seem to slip around the clock. In the past I’d estimated it was nearly one extra hour per day, that perhaps I was simply running 25-hour days – yet my actual experience seems to tell me it isn’t whole hours. I don’t reliably gain seven hours every week; It’s somewhat less. Mars has a day approximately 24 hours and 40 minutes long. I intend to develop a system for calculating and tracking Martian daylight & seasons in parallel with my own wake/sleep cycles, to see whether there is any correlation. If/when I figure out where on Mars I am (or that I’m actually running at some other regular rate, or a wildly irregular rate, which I also strongly suspect) I’ll be sure to post an update.