*And other mitigating factors.

Rain, Pancakes, and Royalties

It’s now late afternoon here in Lithia, Florida, on this dark, rainy, and even stormy Summer Solstice 2023. Currently, the temperature is 86°F/30°C with rain showers affecting our neighborhood. It’s so dark outside that I’ve had to turn on my bedroom lamp so I can see my keyboard and know where my fingers are tapping away on it.

I had a nice lunch sometime around 2:30 PM; someone went to Cracker Barrel earlier today and was kind enough to bring me some pancakes with stewed apples on top and some cornbread. I heated this repast in the microwave and brewed two cups of coffee. I thus ended up having two breakfasts several hours apart – a welcome and pleasant surprise, to be sure.

Another pleasant surprise was a notification from Kindle Direct Publishing letting me know that I earned $3.21 in royalties from the sale of a single paperback copy of Reunion: A Story. Obviously, I wish more people – including friends and relatives that know the book exists (and has existed since July of 2018) – would buy a copy. If not for themselves because they don’t read for pleasure (and I, unfortunately, know quite a few folks that do not), then to give to others that do read for enjoyment and not just for school or work.

Ah, if wishes were book sales, I’d be a bestselling author on the same lofty critical and – more crucially at this point – commercial levels as, say, Stephen King, Nora Roberts, John Scalzi, or Harry Turtledove.

Alas, wishing can only get you so far in any profession, so I keep trying to (a) boost sales of Reunion by gentle prodding, which doesn’t really work as well as I’d like, and (b) writing new books (one at a time), hoping that if the first book didn’t sell well, the new one will do better.

So, okay. I am disappointed that sales of Reunion have not even reached the “100 Copies Sold!” mark. But, hey…someone bought a copy sometime last week, and my royalties of $3.21 will be processed and deposited in my bank account by the 29^th.

Yay, me.

Speaking of Writing New Books

Er, about Reunion: Coda and my writing plan for today…no dice. The weather, combined with a later-than-usual start of the workday on my part, and that “Do I work on Chapter Eight, or do I fix the issues on Chapter 10, Scene One today?” question that nagged at me earlier seriously affected my ability to work on the manuscript.

Oh, I read the first scene of the 10^th chapter, found some mistakes, and made corrections, so it’s not like I didn’t do anything with the novel. Fixing bonehead mistakes now will prevent both frustration and unnecessarily difficult work later. Sure, it slows things down a bit at a stage when I, if I followed Stephen King’s advice in his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, should only be pushing forward with the first draft and worrying about revisions and editing once that’s finished. But, for good or ill (mostly ill, it seems), I tend to do things my way.

But see, when I wrote the first draft of Reunion back in 1998, I did the rough draft of the novella (at the time, I thought I’d written a “short story,” which is why I gave it the A Story subtitle then) in less than a week. And since I only shared that draft with non-writers, I didn’t get any feedback like, “Hey, this story is good, but you should do X, or Y, or Z to improve it a bit.”

Needless to say, when I self-published Reunion back in July of ’18, I thought I’d done a reasonable job with my second self-published book – and first self-published work of fiction – only to find out that while the basic story was good and touched readers’ hearts as intended, it could have been much better in many areas, including basic presentation and aesthetics, more accurate re the geography of certain locales, and the inevitable overlooked typos and grammatical errors that slipped by me between ’98 and 2018.

This is also the reason I asked a trusted friend (and fellow writer) to be my Beta Reader; a second set of neutral eyes can catch things that I, the emotionally attached author, will inevitably miss and, by doing so, help me fix problematic passages now rather than later.   

Anyway, it’s already evening (just past 6 PM here in the Tampa Bay area), and since I don’t fare well when I start writing for “work” so late, I will just stop worrying about the novel for today and start on it as early as possible tomorrow. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it slows me down and postpones the publication by one more day.

But I’m a human being and I’m tired, Dear Reader. I’m sure that taking a long hot shower after lunch may have lowered my blood pressure and added to my feelings of physical and mental fatigue. Plus, let’s face it – I’m 60, not 20 or even 25 years old now. Writing at odd hours of the day didn’t faze me (much) when I was a high school senior or a college student, but, boy, I sure get tired easily when I push myself to write after a certain time of day.[1]

And, on this note, I will call it a day and publish this so I can go “chillax” for a while. So, until we meet again, stay safe and healthy…and don’t take shit from anybody, y’all hear?

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[1] The only time in recent memory that I was able to bulldoze my way through an “all-day” writing session was last November when I wrote the Remembering Cheryl T series of blog posts. I’m still surprised that I got through several marathon sessions, one of which lasted – no shit – 13 hours from start to finish, and only had some muscle aches and eyestrain issues the next day. But, then again, I was writing something from personal experience (albeit “long-suppressed memories”), while writing a novel involves “making up the story as I go along.”