I’m wrapping this post up early this week. Friday I’m tied up from noon on with load-in and a tech rehearsal for Nutcracker, another rehearsal Saturday, and performances on Saturday and Sunday.
Shop Local
I read another “I’m going to shop local this Christmas” pledge this week on Facebook.
I have small business in mind. Made a pledge to shop locally from now on. Cancelled my Amazon Prime and will not shop there any longer. Why? Because I can see the future. We’ve been warned of it before. If we don’t shop locally small businesses will fold. Who thinks that a better world will come from having to work at Amazon? They don’t pay well.
The person wrote more, but that’s the gist of it. Amazon bad, local good. And I get that general thinking. You’re usually better off shopping local because in theory, the giant box stores and Amazon don’t help locals.
Except, they’re an author. They’ve got three books out, and they’re all for sale on…Amazon. So if they’ve cancelled their Amazon Prime account, are they going to pull their books from Amazon as well?
As it turns out, the author is traditionally published through a small press, so they may not have much control over where their books are sold. I note their publisher works with Bookshop.org to distribute their books through local bookshops.
I just find it curious that an author would take that position, that the primary retailer they’re selling through is bad.
And I could probably do an entire blog post discussing “shopping local.”
Writing
Never a dull moment for a writer.
I’m around 96k words into Ghost of Innocence, and at the moment, I’m a little hung up on where things are going to go next. And while I was considering different ideas, it occurred to me that with as many victims as I have in the story, I may have made things too complex.
I also began wondering if I really should have written this in first person.
I started it that way because that’s how it appeared in my head. That was a little unusual for me. The Sad Girl was the expansion of a prompted short story. Don’t Stop Believing came from the song. But Keith Vincent just kind of appeared in my mind with one hell of an opening line. I can’t point to any one thing that inspired Ghost.
Just about every story I’ve written so far has been first person POV, and I’m not sure why. Even my early stuff from the 80s and 90s, long tossed in the back of the figurative file drawer, was mostly first person. I’m not sure why that was or is. I think most of them just came out that way. And if I ever get going on my Red Dirt justice series, those books will, almost by necessity, be third person. I think it would be too confusing to write an unconnected series of stories in first person.
But what to do about Ghost right now? Recall a few weeks ago I said that I’d felt stuck with the story, so I wrote out a couple of chapters in third person. I said at the time that I kind of felt like I might need to change the POV of the story. We’ll see. I’ve got a beta reader I trust, and I’m going to be seeing Editor Friend in a couple of weeks, so I can get their input on the idea.
Would it be a terrible thing to shift gears so drastically at this point? Not really. The bones of the story are still good. And I’m not under a deadline to an agent or a publisher. I’d bet if I focused on the rewrite, I could knock it out in a month because after I get back from Pennsylvania, my schedule is pretty clear. For now, anyway.
As I said, we’ll see. I really need to focus on finishing the story first.
Goals
I’m going to try setting goals again. The last time I did anything concrete was two years ago (well, technically three years ago) and one of those goals (for 2023) was to finish Ghost.
Yeah.
Most of the goals are pretty generic, like my blogging goals. “Continue the blog streak.” Yeah, that’s seemingly easy enough to do at this point. I’m 138 posts along as of this week, so it’s safe to say I’ve got that habit in place.
A new goal for blogging though is to “Make a concerted effort to write other posts.” That means I want to write more Voice posts, more Music For a Sunday Afternoon posts, and more of the “extra” writing posts. That’s things like Writers Coffee Club, Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, and WordWeavers prompted posts. WWBC helped me write an extra six posts this year, and I used WordWeavers for a couple of TikTok videos. WW and WCC I think were more intended as social media prompts than blogging guides, but I think I can make it work.
I’m going to up my wordcount goal, too. It’s currently 200,000 words between the blog and fiction. I won’t hit that this year, though I had the right rate since I shifted my writing location a few months ago. To hit 200k, I needed to write just under 3,850 words per week. I hit that in 10 of the last 16 weeks. I’m kicking around a couple of different targets which involves trying to decide if I should set a yearly goal and determine my weekly rate from there, or set a weekly goal and take the annual goal from that. It probably seems like it shouldn’t matter which way I plan it, and if I look at things objectively, it probably doesn’t. But when have I ever been objective and realistic about my writing?
Actually, I looked at the math, and based on my rate over the last 16 weeks, I’d have beat my annual goal handily. I averaged just over 4,615 words a week, which would have put me at just under 240,000 words for the year.
Maybe that’s where I should set my goal for next year. We’ll see.
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