You Have Solved This Problem Before

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Elizabeth George writes a journal for every novel, logging thoughts, ideas, and problems before she starts her writing day. Every day, she runs through the same pattern: read an entry from an old journal from previous novels, then write a new entry about the book she’s currently working on.

This habit gives her the scope to recognise that whatever she’s experiencing right now, she’s experienced it in the past and worked her way through. Problems got solved, and books got written. 

There are damn few problems in writing sufficiently new that I’ve got no experience in figuring out how to battle through. The problem is never solutions — it’s registering the problem is in play and certain solutions are entirely within my control, even if they’re difficult to implement.

Having looked through my calendar yesterday and recognised, yes, I was definitely not in a good place, I then ran through the checklist of things I know will help after a terrible month of writing:

  • Block out my day (and writing commitments) the night before, so I know what gets done when
  • Set my alarm an hour earlier
  • Don’t touch the phone first thing in the morning
  • Get up, feed the cat, and handwrite in the brain dump journal
  • Jot down rough notes for today’s writing session before I write, because I don’t have time to ponder as I go right now 

I’d let some of those things slide during the chaos of November. At least two I’d been ignoring for months prior to that, because they were solutions to a particular problem (limited writing time) I haven’t faced in five years.

But I’ve solved this problem before using tools I’ve picked up here and there. And there’s no shortage of tools and ideas that might help (I rediscovered Elizabeth George’s Write Away and journal habits while revisiting John Roger’s Notebook system, and was reminded the power of rough notes in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Writing Through Fatigue workshop on her Patreon).

Trying to Reclaim That LiveJournal Feeling

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

For a few years now, I’ve lamented the death of blogging as a form with a widespread readership. While there’s still a few formats that have similar broadcast capabilities — a lot of my blogging impulses moved over to my newsletter around 2017 — none of them have the same capacity to provoke conversations and follow them as blogging once did. Newsletter responses are private and one-on-one, rather than conversation. Twitter threads move fast, and quickly disappear beneath the surface.

Patreon, which is probably my favourite platform at the moment, has the drawback of being a walled garden, which means the people who read and comment to you really want to be reading your stuff,, but can’t share content around as easily.

Blog still have some legs as a long-form medium, but there’s a mid-range kind of blogging or journaling that’s largely invisible these days. The kind of content that once used to appear on LiveJournal, where you could just show up and talk about what’s on your mind, without formulating the headings and graphics and calls to action that characterise blogging’s dominant mode here in 2022.

Some of my recent reading led me to think about Facebook as a platform, the whole notion of social media as a hypersigil, and what can be done if you use the platform in ways that run counter to norms and expectations. Which has led to an interesting week of using Facebook as a mid-range blogging platform, doing short-bursts of 300 to 500 words.

Since some of it may be of interest to readers here, I’ve pulled together a curated list of links from the last week below.

Going Full Cyborg

Balancing Work and Publishing

Running Before You Can Walk

Preparing to Go Bigger

Putting Money Where My Mouth Is Around Backlist

There’s no telling how long I’ll do this. At the moment, it’s an interesting diversion while my brain is focused on other things, and I expect the Facebook algorithms are sharing it rather widely because I’ve suddenly gone from avoiding the site to using it rather extensively.

But it has been interesting to write stuff and see folks interact with it, in a way that harkens back to a version of the internet I thought lost over a decade ago.

Storefronts

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

My two favourite e-book stores to deal with as a publisher are, ironically, the two places where I sell the least books. While Kobo and DriveThruFiction are probably the small fish in my sales lines, they have the distinction of being the two distributors I regularly deal with give every indication they’re *actually interested in being a bookstore*.

Almost everywhere else I sell ebooks — Amazon, Google, and Apple — wants the ebook business as a part of a larger business strategy. Apple wants to make it easy to keep you within the walled Garden of their operating system; Google wants to absorb huge amounts of data and keep their search engine in peak shape (and, from the looks of their recent “let us create your audiobook” feature, a source of testing AI development); Amazon…well, the big river makes no bones about the fact that books where their easy-to-disrupt market where the products were loss-leaders that lured folks into more profitable areas of online shopping (and, these days, advertising revenue).

DriveThru grew out of the digital RPG market, where I started my publishing journey back in 2005, and while the publisher interface is clunky and not all that different from when I started, they have a toolkit for authors that I only *wish* other vendors would adopt. Kobo is attached to a larger ecommerce retailer, but seems content to keep their bookstore as a bookstore, rather than a lead-in for other types of sales.

I would be a happy author/publisher if more people used those sites (and happier still if I could coax more folks into buying their books directly from my websites), but just as big chain stores are often more convenient than specialty stores in the physical retail space, the ebook folks who want to be bookstores aren’t always as convenient as the big players.

So I sell books through the larger stores, often in greater quantities, and quietly make a point of mentioning the smaller players in the hopes that one or two extra people realise just how valuable they are in the publishing ecosystem.