BellaOnline Forums Career Fiction Writing What Did You Write Today?

I finally feel like I can start to breathe again. My servers still have hiccups but are generally running smoothly. I just finished all the Mused Literary Review voting. I still have pending finishing reading all the BellaOnline Ebook Award entries, but I can now tackle that with focus and attention, which was important to me. I was just too frazzled up until now.

It is NaNoWriMo but I’ve hit reservations about my Oxendine story. I find I’m hesitant to cast Naomi Oxendine’s first lover in an “abusive” light as he is part of many peoples’ genealogies. I don’t want to upset them. What if they think of him as a treasured great-great-great-great grandfather for some reason? He was known as the “Devil” Bill Williams but maybe they think that was a term of endearment. Or playful wildness. So I’ve stalled. I also had her cheating on Bill – the timing is that she had two kids with him (unmarried) then her next child with the next guy is the very next year. So the kids come rapid fire. But I’m not sure if a cheating heroine is going to sit well with people. And I find I resist it as well. So I think I want to redo that. I don’t think I’ll finish my 50k words by the 30th, in any case.

I did some work on medieval novel #14, but find myself discouraged that it’s only 20k words or so and already at chapter 15. I wrote lots of short chapters. I like my novels to end up about 70k words as a minimum. The longest is 117k words. The story is already at its halfway point so I feel like I’m going to have to drag it out. That’s what happened to Looking Back, where I had to keep having stuff happen to her after where I thought the story “should end”. So I want to avoid that feeling.

I have 12 medieval novels out, and the reason I skipped working on #13 is that the characters there sleep together within a day. I’ve gotten grief from some readers about my characters in Sworn Loyalty (#11) sleeping together after only a week, and those characters had some history. My readership likes the more gentle, slow approach to things. Which I do appreciate. So I have to ponder what to do. Maybe I will rearrange things so they are just lusting at the beginning. It’s one of those face-death-and-fall-hard situations. And she’s a widow, so she’s not a blushing virgin. Still, though.

I haven’t done my compiling of my black cat series yet. I need to do that. It feels “tedious” to do so I’m putting it off, but it would bring in easy income. So I should just do it.

I’m really liking doing the watercolors to go with my poetry book. It’s incredibly relaxing and soothing. And I can do them while watching TV with Bob, so a win-win. I’m also liking working with my friend Debi on a children’s book about a black cat. Again, relaxing and soothing.

The biggest issue that’s hit recently is that Amazon spotted one of my books which was set as Kindle Exclusive and which accidentally went live in Lulu. Amazon then stripped ALL of my Kindle Exclusive books out of KU which was bringing me in great traffic. I wrote them promptly to apologize, I fixed Lulu, and I asked what I can do to fix this. I haven’t heard back and it’s been several days. That’s unusual for them. So I think they’re not going to relent. This means I have to quickly get all those books live in all other systems to try to make up that lost income. I was making a fair amount from the KU borrows. Can I make that much with those books in other systems as “sales”? A lot of these are 99 cent books that I was getting $1.51 paid to me per borrow, rather than the 30 cent royalty one normally makes. So I’d have to sell 5 times as many books to make it up, on systems like iTunes and Nook which traditionally get far lower traffic than Amazon does. So part of me sees this as fairly challenging. But on the other hand I hear from writer after writer that they make as much if not more on these other platforms than they do on Amazon, so it’s about finding that audience. If this is just the way things are for me now (being blocked from KU) then I need to give it a whole-hearted try. Wishing for a change or grousing about life changing does little good. I need to see what the new reality is and tackle it as best I can.

I want to do a yoga book, maybe because it’d be quick, easy, and relaxing. But I do have so many other pending projects that I should put it off. Still, I find in life if I do something I crave that it gets done quickly, easily, and then I move on to other things with energy. If instead I force myself to do less-in-tune projects they go slowly and everything takes longer. So at least for me the key to cranking through projects is to energize myself with ones I love. That then gives me the energy to get through the other ones quickly as well.

How are you guys doing this week?

Lisa