#NETwalkers Alliance

[jreynoldsward]

This was the view this morning. About three inches here. It melted away during most of the day, but now it's snowing again. However, we're supposed to have temps in the 60s next Sunday. Will that happen? We shall see....

Another week where I'm wrestling with the very concept of doing this accountability work. Today was a big day and a first--the first quarterly assessment since I've started this tracking system. That meant I looked at my planned production schedule and--flinched. Yes, I'm running behind. Not just for the month but for the year. A big chunk of that, however, was figuring out promotion this month and trying to find a balance between promotion, authentic interactions on social media, and writing time. And horse time, and house time, and sewing time as well!

But I got things done this past month. The updated versions of the Martiniere books are now all up, and all I need to do is tweak the back matter once in a while. At this point, I'm focusing on getting the Netwalk books up--and I absolutely cringed when I looked at my Bowker ISBN listings. Netwalk has something like seven different ISBN versions, all for ebooks, none for paperback. SIGH. Yes, this reflects what was considered to be the thing to do during the early days of self-publishing. You got an ISBN for Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble/Kobo because they all had different variants of epub. I eventually dropped getting ISBN for the proprietary Amazon ebooks, then moved to just using distributor ISBNs. Still, I wish I could have had those numbers for the upcoming paperbacks. Oh well. Another batch purchased from Bowker in my future. I've learned my lesson.

Daylight Saving Time also really screwed me up as far as productivity is concerned. However, one thing that is working is using my alarm to get up at eight. Yeah, yeah, that's the easy life of a retiree, except that if I don't watch it, I end up sleeping in more and more, and I don't get as much done.

I am also backing off from trying to market short stories except as a part of a collection. I looked at the rejects I have right now, and decided it was time to hold them for a collection. I realized that I might be able to put together a Weird West collection with my Oregon Country short stories. Two are published; one isn't, and since all three are on the longish side, they can possibly make a nice little grouping. I need to go back through and look at some of my other work as well. If one story comes back, then it would be a good part of a fabulist collection. I could pull out the longer version of that story and combine it with two, perhaps three others for another collection.

The rest? I may need to look at what's SF and what's not, and group them appropriately. I might actually have enough for two separate collections, so...four short story collections, potentially?

Wow. Plus the Tales of the Raven Alliance. One story is out on submission and I may just pull it when it comes back, and use that one for the foundation for a Kindle Vella set of stories before I publish it as a collection.

(And now I need to set up a spreadsheet collecting those stories...eiyiyi).

The Cost of Power is now at around 60k words, and might turn into another Martiniere short series. Or not. I wrote about half of those words in the past two weeks, in part because I had visualized the story to that point. Now I need to turn that energy to Federation Cowboy. I want to get both of those books finished so I can move onto the Goddess's Vision series--oh, and once I finish rereleasing the Netwalk books in paperback, the Goddess's Honor series--incorporating the connected short stories in some cases--will be the next to be reissued.

Plus I made two book bags, one for donation, the other for my projected online store where I'll be selling my small quilting projects along with my books. That's a long term goal. I also made spring decorations and summer decorations--just need to do fall, and then I'll start making SFFnal versions for...online sales.

Busy times ahead.

[thefranklinschildren]

Walks, rides, campaigns, dinners highlight months ahead

Walks, rides, campaigns, dinners highlight months ahead

Our biggest fundraiser last year was our annual clam boil. It helped fund the walks of multiple members of our NETwalkers Alliance team. Six months of event planning

We have a wide range of events over the next seven months���culminating in the Boston Marathon Jimmy Fund Walkat the end of September. Most focus on NET cancer, but in keeping with my determination to make even the training walks…

[jreynoldsward]

I'm now getting to the dangerous stage of any organizational process change. I recognize the phenomenon--a certain impatience, the thought that oh I really don't need to do this anymore, I have the routine down, maybe it's sufficiently internalized that I don't need to go through this step when it comes to thinking about the executive meeting with myself every Sunday. Which always ends up becoming a big mistake, because then I am overconfident about the degree to which I've made these routines into habits and...yeah. Everything starts to slide, including productive patterns that haven't quite made that final jump into habit. I overlook the reality that this past week was not as productive as previous weeks for various reasons, including body stuff, and that if I look back at what I have done this year already because of the new approach to organizing myself, these new methods work.

Yeah, this is a known failure point, not just for myself but for others who struggle with changing their processes. The 90-ish day of the method. When I was working with horses that were at the barn for rehab training, this was the period when old behaviors would start to crop up again, as a means of boundary testing. Same held true for students.

So this is why reflecting back (for humans) to see what has been able to happen is a good thing. I wish I had stressed that aspect more with my students. With the horses, it just meant a patient revisiting of early concepts and a restatement that the new rules are still in effect, no going back to the old ways.

And now I'm making myself push past this mark. I still need these organizational structures and probably will, in order to be an active and producing writer. There are no shortcuts.

What fell by the wayside this week was a lot of original drafting work. Oh, I did some edits on Federation Cowboy and got some new words down. But not every day, and not necessarily a lot of words. Cowboy appears to be one of those slow-moving works on the writing side of things, where I have to think about the process and the story. I think it is going to be a shorter novel, probably around 60k words, much like Beating the Apocalypse is. Which--would account for the slowness of the drafting. The shorter the work, sometimes the longer it takes to write. I'm packing a lot into this book and it shows, the more I work on it.

Other things. The dragon short story was the most popular of the freebies in the latest Smashwords sale. That makes me think that perhaps I should focus some energy into that particular world. I already have two of the stories written--Teacher-of-Dragons and Restoring Hope (currently out on submission under a different title). I can't take it to Vella for drafting because Teacher has already been published, but perhaps I could turn it into an omnibus of sorts with Restoring and several other stories set in the world of the Raven Alliance. It might make more sense than pushing on with the Vortex books, which have their own issues. Hmm. The story might make a nice short book. Tales of the Raven and Dragon Alliance.

I seem to have finally settled into the new cover for Justine Fixes Everything. I didn't like the previous image I had selected for assorted reasons, but this one evokes the mood of the book significantly better. Thematically, it hearkens back to the Netwalk books, which--Justine is heavy on the digital thought clones, which are a variant of the digital personality uploads in the Netwalk books.

I got the new version of Realization (light copy-edited interior, new cover) uploaded to Ingram and anticipate being able to approve it in a few days. Working now on the interior of Justine and plan to rerelease this week with the new cover, in hopes that it is a better match for the other People of the Martiniere Legacy books. Justine is the last of the revised Martiniere covers to be issued. Then it's working on the paperback versions of the 2022 Netwalk books. Once I'm done with Netwalk, then I plan to redo the Goddess's Honor covers and interiors. The interiors are...well, they were all done in Scrivener and there are issues. Fix those up while working on the new series set in that world, which is still being stubborn about telling me what it's about. The Raven Alliance book may be the new distraction, or it may not be. We shall see.

[thefranklinschildren]

Walk season

The walking man

I walk a great deal. Under normal circumstances, I walk 3-5 miles every day. In the summer, as I ramp up for the Boston Marathon Jimmy Fund Walk, that number climbs until I am doing 60-80 miles a week. After that 26.2 mile effort, I taper off for a few months. Winter arrives and I am reduced to walking an hour each day in a local mall.

Come walk with me.

Walking is good for me…