Well, not a lot going on around here. No appreciable progress on Generation Zee (some, but very little).
But I have been working with a marketing person on updating my stories in KDP (Kindle) and we’ve updated Fun City, which is pretty exciting. New keywords and categories, and very importantly, a new and greatly improved description. I also reduced the price from $2.99 to $1.00 (who would pay $2.99 for a single short story? If I did, I would feel ripped off). Of course that means the royalty is reduced – the minimum price is $2.99 to get the best royalty rate. So instead of a 70% royalty, I’ll only get 35% on any sales, but I’m okay with that for a short story.
Eventually all the short stories will be marked down in the same way. They are all already $.99 here on my website, so I think that is fair.
While Generation Zee isn’t moving very fast, I did sign up for a workshop with Jessica Brody for Fast Drafting – I bought the book she wrote, Page One to Done, and it’s interesting. I was already a fan of hers for an earlier book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Which I have used while writing Generation Zee. It’s an outlining method where you only note the beats of the story, not a full outline. I would not be able to write to a full outline, as I write by the seat of my pants – I never know what is going to end up on the page when I sit down to type.
But this new method of hers intrigued me. The idea of fast drafting, to possibly get a first draft done in 30 or 60 days sounds good after writing Generation Zee for 10+ years! So the workshop demonstrated the method of getting it all down. Of course, it was only two hours, so we couldn’t get an entire book written, just preliminary ideas, characters, things like that. I decided to use my Romantasy for this project as I have completed some research and character profiles, but only wrote a few pages into chapter 1 – and I wasn’t thrilled with what I wrote, so maybe this method will help me.
In the meantime, I have to finish reading her book, and then put it into practice. I’m only reading a few pages a day, so the plan is to have Generation Zee completed before I’m ready to actively try this fast drafting method.
So my plate is pretty full, between writing the novel and newsletters, the short story marketing project, and learning a new method of getting the words down.
But an update isn’t complete without cat pictures. Here’s a couple:
Plus, all my border lilies have gone by. They all came up at different times, so we had about a month of pretty flowers. Here’s a memory of one of them, plus one plant that is still blooming – the African Daisies seem to love the heat, as long as they get plenty of water.
Hopefully, I’ll have more to report at the end of the month.
